Some say parents form the basis of your morals at an early age, their actions mark on your unconscious as the means for judging right and wrong in your life later while some will argue that what you believe to be moral or immoral is a gradual process that builds up over time through plain trial and error evaluations. Still more would assert that morality lies within yourself, that what you believe is based within, something within have an influence on what you are and what you do. Nature or nurture, for whatever reason I am the way I am, you will probably loathe or even despise people like me. However, it may not be why you hate people like me. It may be because you are envious of me, or maybe my indifferent attitudes about my material success could give you a brief hunch of rage, but you do not really loathe me for things like that. It is more like the amount of money I take advantage of my workers out of, the devices I secretly employ to keep desperate illegal immigrants working for me at appalling wages, and the multiple tax fraud I have committed are the reasons why you find it revolting. However, I have never been caught but still I know deep down I do know how much I would be hated if, for even a second, this mask I wear daily came off. If, even just for once, people were to see me in my true light, you will really despise who I am – because I used to hate guys like myself when I was younger.

Once in a while, reports come in about people just like me and I hear everybody talk about how much they hate them or what they would do if the penalty were up to them. However, I know the fact is that rich bastards will get off with the minimum punishment, probably by paying loads of money (but that makes little disparity considering the money is stolen in a sense.)

And I know all this perfectly well as it is exactly what I myself would do.

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*

Today I knock off early – something not many people in my position does that, but for today, an urge took hold of me. I was enjoying my favorite meal at an old food court and I thought about the things I have done and the things I am doing, and I wondered for a moment whether or not to be proud. I think yes, I have done a lot, but have I really done anything to be proud of? Sure, there is my very own company, but it is filthy in my own mind. Although I am not quite sure why but I still do it now.

As I was leaving the food court, an feeble looking old lady asked to have my tray cleared and I told her I would do it on my own yet she replied if she did not clean up after me, what use would she be?

It was heartrending and I guess it had yet to dawn on some people what awaits them yet and during that brief moment, I cannot help but think back to that old man I used to once worked with all those years ago……

When I was a kid, some time during my school term break, I did a little construction work for my father’s company. It was a nightmare. I can still remember some days I could barely make it; the muscles in our arms would burn at the end of the day. There was this old Chinese guy there who had this job in his entire life I think. Construction was just about all he knew since he had little education. He had an old raspy voice, the type only men like him could have the type who had been working their entire lives away, the type that only knew what backbreaking labor was about, and who had done it so long that there was no idea as a tomorrow without it. Anyway, this old Chinese fellow worked very hard but there were always times when age would catch up to him. I remembered it was mainly the lifting that troubled his thinning frame and for a minute, the lines on his face would prevail as if they are standing out on their own against his skin, and you could see a sort of helplessness in him as he clenched his eyes shut and waited for it to pass. And, as soon as it had begun, the fire in the muscle would come blazing back as quickly as they had departed. Those wrinkled lids opened back up and sometimes they would connect with yours. If they did, as always they seemed to, his raspy voice would be repeating the same old phrases.

“Boy,” he used to say in his heavily Chinese-accented English, that voice as low and rough as ever, “growing old is hell.”

Looking back, it is perplexing to remember what the old man had said so long ago and he never constrained its meaning.

“Boy, growing old is hell.”

However, he never once remarked that growing old is hell because of something. He never remarked it was hell due to your health, or losing loved ones to disease, time or watching your children leave you. Had that been on purpose? Probably not, but as I look back, I cannot help but hate the old man for being so right in his statement. Maybe he became despondent that he had been doing it this long. Perhaps there is no pride other than making money to buy souls which will come to a sad end for many. Suicides of older folks have been increasing slowly and what is there to really to look forward to except work and more work and like a carousel it mocks? In such a society, what kills is a mislaid worth of values. When the lights are dark, the vision blur as you watched your superciliousness years played out before your languishing bones, the call to restful eternal bliss only seems to be more persistence.

During the long nights I spent turning and tossing and ensuring that extra money I should not have in the first place remains mine, or try to make sure I will not be the next person waiting his court date, I can still see his fragile frame, going back and forth through half-finished buildings on the construction site. Maybe I am just instinctively trying to avoid the life of slow hardship that I had seen that old man go through at the hands of my father, and ironically enough that I put others through to assure I will never have to but of course, I think it is most possibly that I am just a greedy bastard.

There are times when I look back and, despite the luxury of my position, I know that we are the same -- that old man and I.