Thomas Gordon afterthought

This morning I realised I was being too hard on mister Gordon. There is a deeply personal choice I made that has left me biased. When I was 21 I choose to lock-up my alcoholic father, and when he was sober I made him go into rehab. Was he grateful for what I did to him? No, at the time he evidently wished to die. He was not eating, drinking straight gin all day and he had three suicide attempts to his name. Clearly an action mister Gordon would not approve of. And perhaps he is right. On the right hand side Zeno of Citum, I will explain later why.



In the consideration I weighed a couple things: My own way out of Weltschertz, when I was 9, was the conclusion that however bad things get: you never know what bliss is around the corner. Drinking yourself to death, in my view, is not really an option. The second thought was the Christian approach: the body is a gift of God and not yours to do with as you please. A third reason was the position of my siblings, who barely had had a chance to know their father back then. So I choose to save him, against  his own will, because I thought his judgement was clouded. I was successful in getting him "on the wagon".

He was not grateful. This I did not know at the time but the roll reversal thing runs quite deep in people. Later I leaned that mad king George shunned friends that helped him in his madness after he got well and the story of Noah Genesis 9:20-25  speaks for itself on this point. I think he was embarrassed. In the end he never even believed me. It cost me dearly on a personal level (I am a sensitive guy) and in the end, 5 years later it cost me my relationship with my father.

Would I do it again? Absolutely! Was it a wise decision? Perhaps not. What it did instill in me is the feeling that sometimes you need to do the right thing even if it is distasteful, embarrassing and against what would normally be considered human dignity. So I have a personal bias why I will not accept mister Gordon's ideas without being oppositional. I should not have. Better to think on the reasons and motivation of Gordon himself. I still feel he is overly Romantic but then again, I am either a Cynic or a Stoic, so that in itself does nmean he is wrong.

My private situation was probably not what mr Gordon had in mind when he wrote his book. I can not blame him for that so I should not have been so critical.

Brandon