The Tracks of Your Life

Disillusionment with corporate America doesn't have to be a terminal disease after all. Within its structure, there may be maverick human hearts with the moral mischief and wherewithal to break through the walls of profit-seeking absolutism and countermand the algorithms that protect their bottom-lines with regulatory overkill.

My close friend took his disabled, middle-aged son to a major bank to open an account and apply for a credit card. He knew that his son's spotty work history and a nonexistent credit history would be obstacles, but the young adult had finally broken free of decades of paralyzing stagnation, getting his act together and was unstoppably fixed on making tangible strides towards normalization and immersion in everyday life.

He didn't have to convince himself of his worthiness anymore. But the financial industry would be another matter. 

It's never too late to rise above one's misfortunes, regardless of their origin. Glorious days are the slowest to breach the night.

It was difficult to obtain the many forms of mandated official identification documents, but being an American citizen, he wouldn't qualify for an exemption or flexibility. Although everything was complete and in order, he was nonetheless told later during the interview that his application had been rejected and "Sorry. There's nothing we can do."

The consolation was sincere but pro-forma and feeble.

The bank officer was clearly sympathetic, apologetic and frustrated, but he could not vacate a cyber-generated ruling. He went through the motions of trying, but it was like EMS pronouncing someone dead after a few cursory chest compressions.

People of good faith, capability and burning ambition can do all the right things to straighten out their life, qualify for a future of independence and usefulness to society, but still be sentenced by the banking system to a lifetime of permanent stasis, limbo and exclusion. 

If, for any reason, you haven't memorialized the tracks of your life by establishing a credit history, it's almost like you've lost your membership in the human race. A few credit agencies have the power of feudal monarchs or indeed imperial Caesars. They give the thumbs down to a bank's aspiring "private clients" as though coveters of a credit card were gladiatorial combatants. 

Whatever became of the rumored "American Dream" of bettering oneself?  Hold your (lame) horses.  That theoretical fantasy doesn't universally apply. 

But there is hope! 

Although hoping for a glimmer of compassion from a corporation is a longshot bordering on the remotest miracle, my friend discovered that "corporations can be people after all." If there is a will, there will be a way to override the soulless arbitrariness of the corporate calculus.

The visit to the bank was a long ordeal that looked doomed to failure. It was clear that the branch manager had a strong and sincere desire to help, but was hamstrung by implacable, robotized guidelines.

 My friend considered calling legislators and the media to the harsh restrictiveness of banking regulations, and exhausting every other conceivable recourse, in the realization that corporations are immune to shaming but not litigation.  

But the manager swore she'd do her best on this mission of mercy, and voila! Two days later, the original denial was reversed, and my friend's son was approved for a limited line of credit. 

It sounds like no big deal, but prevailing against corporate mulishness was a prodigious feat.  The ball is almost always in the corporate court.  But sometimes they surprise you. 

Stew Leonard Jr. is president and CEO of the grocery store chain that bears his name. He tripled his company's profits while building a reputation for being pro-worker and consumer friendly. The Firm grew from around a half-dozen to several thousand employees.

A large majority of managers are in-house promotions.  The New York Times once called it "the Disneyland of Dairy Stores."  Fortune Magazine listed Stew Leonard's as one of the 100 best companies in America to work for.  I haven't made any independent inquiries, and assume this is a valid assessment, despite a lawsuit filed five years ago in which a former loss prevention manager called it a "toxic and unsafe workplace."

Being both a robust capitalist and an altruistic patron of worthy causes need not mutually exclusive.  When rich people show charity, no matter their political bona fides, it is not necessarily a savvy exercise in tax-deduction, or virtue signaling.  Sometimes it is personal trauma that shocks them into acts of benevolence.

Stew Leonard Jr.'s only son drowned during infancy in a 1989 swimming accident.  His current radio ad is quite poignant. He's not reciting a scripted public service announcement. He pays for swimming lessons for many thousands of needy kids and released a series of books, with an app version, about water safety, which is used at children's hospitals and by firefighters nationwide.

The guy doesn't sound alike an arrogant, condescending corporatist to me. 

And Jason Arday, most certainly was much more than a teller of tall tales, like Mitty, Baron Munchausen or Till Eulenspiegel. 

Jason Arday, who was the youngest Black professor in the history of Cambridge University (founded in 1209), killed himself last August, days after having resigned from his prestigious academic position after a wildfire of allegations that he had committed massive plagiarism and misrepresentations of his academic and other achievements in life. Among those assertions were that he was non-verbal until eleven years of age, learned to read and write at 18, completed 30 marathon races in barely a month, sprinted 600 miles in under a week, raised millions for charity, composed a preponderantly original dissertation, and numerous other claims that have been credibly disputed or proven erroneous.

Arday was lionized as a megastar and leading light in the civil rights movement.   He was catapulted to enormous international acclaim and practically venerated for his intellectual precocity.  Cambridge finally began vetting him in earnest, after a couple of years of vigorously defending him.  There were choruses of "fraud" and competing choirs of "racism."

Arday's death was a wretched tragedy that was aggravated by the bitter and pathologically gleeful derision of many of his sadistically celebratory critics. 

Arday was an upstanding person, even if falling short on the largely meaningless credentials framed in picture frames on walls.  What he apparently did should not have gone unpunished, but he was mercilessly attacked by some of the most culpable, fortune-seeking hypocrites among the proponents of so-called "meritocracy."

His colleagues and students learned plenty from him. In a broader sense, he was highly qualified. Mozart, Dickens, Einstein, Freud and Edison would never have secured a college post based on licenses and diplomas either, but what they had experienced and done with their lives would have more than compensated for conventional illegitimacy.

Arday deserved to be embarrassed, not hounded into self-annihilation.  Ironically, the reaction to the Arday disaster was even less about Arday than his claims were about his true self.

His death was exploited both by hustlers who attributed the scrutiny of Arday to harassment driven solely by hostility to his triumphs as a model of DEI at its finest, and by calculating revisionists and scorners of his martyrdom. Some of them were so vile as to say things like "Arday faked his death to gin up his autobiography sales!"

Some believe he could do no wrong because he was Black; others that he could do no right for the same reason.

As a public figure, Arday was fair game for practitioners of ill-will.  There are innumerable Blacks who meet not only the highest standards of Cambridge's sociology professors, but pilots and surgeons also. It's bloody ironic that Arday played into the hands of prowling racists who would use his anomalous legacy to claim the contrary.  He overcame everything except accountability.

Jason Arday was larger than life. And it's not just him saying it.

Author bio

Ron Isaac is a retired teacher and avid unionist who believes that authentic equality for all individuals and groups must be free of the taint and entrancement of wealth, leveraged political relationships, favoritism on any basis and ideological influence.