Artificial Intelligence

My father and I saw life as the same essential struggle to be free, to be free to think or to say what we wanted. That was his big problem with Ho Chi Minh’s Communism. Hence the war. Yada yada yada.

I started a business, a different kind of batle. Employees depended on me for their livelihoods. I told my father, hey, I have a group of about twenty and lead like you once did. Nothing.

Approval wasn’t enough. Approval is not that great. It’s what you hear when you get a loan. We approve of you but we don’t really trust you so we’re gonna tack on this interest rate. Approval sucks. I wanted him to be awestruck.

His more-than-approval meant so little to him but it meant the world to me. I didn’t know when it would stop. You want so much to be loved for who you are that you start doing shit for approval. Taking over other countries—I mean, look at G.W. I could do it too. A short stint in the CIA. Installed into power as a “democratically-elected” leader of a small island country. Become a dictator gradually and throw off my ties to the United States. Nationalize the country’s natural resources. Use the wealth from sales of said resources to build a country-corporation like that of the United Arab Emirates. Meanwhile, harm countless others and harm myself out of a need to feed my ego to compensate for insecurity. Easy peasy.

But then, I saw a picture of my father’s father, my paternal grandfather, for the first time. My grandfather had a white goatee and the meanest eyes and forehead lines I had ever seen. My mother summed him up in one word: ruthless.

I decided that I didn’t want a face like that. And so I gave up on the foolish quest. I realized nothing I did could make my father proud.