Chapter 485 (1/2)

Hank’s father, Rick, had taught Hank and Alan three things.

The first thing was that you only apologize if you mean it. This lesson came in the form of a rough shove after Hank had taken a cookie, and then blamed his brother for it. When they were caught, Hank eventually broke and apologized.

“Are you really sorry?” Rick asked. Hank had hesitated, then shook his head. After all, he had gotten the cookie, when they weren't supposed to. If he was being honest, he was proud of himself.

Rick grinned. “Being honest is best. Time to make sure you told the truth about tonight.”

At first, Hank expected his father to punish him. But he just continued to hum and smile, until Alan got home from a friend’s house. Then Rick had locked Alan in his room without dinner, so that ‘Hank would learn who he should truly apologize to’. It was a long night.

Hank never forgot his little brother’s sobs, after he had stopped pounding on the door. If anything, the silence was more difficult to bear than the earlier cacophony.

The second thing Rick taught his boys was that Clint Eastwood was the greatest actor in the world, and everything about being a man could be learned by watching his movies. This lesson the boys took too with more alacrity, pouring over the entire filmography on VHS during their childhoods.

Much later, when the System had arrived, Hank felt almost like he was returning to his childhood when he obtained his Class, Gunslinger. Everyone initially was disappointed, because Hank had done so well up to this point, and his Class was so… mundane.

Yet time and time again, Hank came out on top of monsters and men alike, all who would threaten the Zone’s new laws. One time, the first time he met Ghost, Hank had asked Ghost why he had given him a Tier 3 rating when his Class was clearly one of the least powerful Classes on record.

Ghost’s hologram projection had laughed at him. “It’s because you believe in it. You’ve spent your entire life dreaming of it, Hank. How could it not be more powerful than these shallow, recently acquired toys?”

The third thing that Hank and Alan had learned from Rick was how and why to love a country.

“You can’t think of your country as a physical place, that’s not the important part.” Rick had said, waving a hand. “Think of the Native Americans. They have one of the most powerful and iconic cultures, even to this day, even as that way of life is dead. Think of the Greeks, of the Romans. Your country is the dream you are building for your children. It’s the desire you instill in them to crave freedom and open sky. It’s the sense of responsibility they feel when faced with moral dilemmas.

“To nurture your country’s soul is to build a future. A flag is a map, and to forget it is for an entire nation of souls to grow lost. There is a certain pervasive disdain for patriotism that I’d like to inoculate you boys against personally. Your country is the sum of your actions; therefore, if you don’t care for your country, your actions have been insufficient to satisfy the implicit responsibilities of citizenship that you hold in your chest. If you don’t care about your country, you also don’t care about yourself, or your future actions.

“When the murky swamp of apathy has risen above the heads of a country’s citizens, they cannot be bothered to right small injustices. Their skin grows numb to the innumerable ticks and pests that infest them. These people become sleepwalkers, in a slumber only surpassed by death in permanence.

“Do you think a dictator could rouse them from that unshakable grip? Do you think such people will be spooked by genocide when their hearts have turned disdainful towards the plight of their fellow man?

“No, they will be carried forward by inertia in their blindness, allowing their country, their true aegis of justice, to decay around them. That’s how America will die, boys. Good men will stop believing in the dream of our nation’s virtue, and no one will willingly take up the mantle to make it so. Without that amorphous defense… we will all perish.

“Something precious you cannot truly describe… that’s what a country is.”

“You are describing it now,” Alan had pointed out. He was 9, and Hank was 13 with enough sense to keep his mouth shut.

Rick chuckled, and Hank slowly relaxed. It was one of his dad’s good days, it seemed.