DN5 -- Self-Made Men, Lyle Saxon, & Class Tension

December 10, 1943

I began to prepare dinner, slowly turning about my task in the kitchen, thinking as slowly as I went about my task. Maybe it is that Saxon is as sick as he thinks. After all, he has been hitting the bottle rather heavily within the last few years. No man can stand that slow poison for long, I thought to myself. Just what made him that way? I have long since ceased to blame anyone for their faults--we are just fashioned that way by early associations and environments. We cannot change, unless  in the environment of our former existences was dropped the seed of change. 

Every "self-made man" owed his making not to his own strong will power but to the fact that somewhere a hundred years ago, or a thousand years ago, was dropped the seed of a strong character which acted directly upon his own. He might have forgotten all about how he came about this strange gift, but the gods of our making never forget. They know that thousands of us are damned because any other thousands in our same circumstances would also be damned--that there are really no self-made men, that somewhere along the moving mass production line of life an experience came here, financial assistance there, seeds of character growth here, human sympathy and understanding from over yonder, strength and vigor from the food our mothers ate before we were even conceived, and resolute determination moving out of the crucible of despair.

But what happened to Saxon? Where along the line he got the seeds of a tragic melancholy and frustration which will sooner or later tear wide the bonds of his own existence? Where came that love of the under-dog and hatred of the overlord--of which he himself is one, and even likes it sometime? Were there black blood connections in the ascending or descending scale of thing. Or was there love? What? Where? Who? I turned and went about preparing my breakfast-dinner of dried shrimps, apple jelly, bread, and Ovaltine.

I took my medicine, thinking about Saxon dying in the laps of plenty. Plenty of warm heat--steam heat--plenty of medicine--plenty of doctors--plenty of flunkies--plenty of food--plenty of everything, but plenty of existence. When men die where there is warmth, food, care, and medicine, what will happen to men who have only cold, hunger, exploitation, and perpetual poverty of a sort? Good Lord!

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