An Empty Legacy

I really hadn't planned to say anything about Steve Fossett, but my ol' buddy J.D. Mullane in the Bucks County Courier Times forced my hand here.

For the benefit of anyone who has been living under a rock for about the last week or so (and don't worry, I almost qualify myself for that one based on my limited exposure to stories like this), Fossett made his fortune in the financial services industry, and then apparently some time around the mid-'90s, he decided to become an adventurer, and subsequently set a whole bunch of records in skiing, mountain climbing, and flying.

He set out for great conquests, and frequently achieved them. However, all I can ever remember about this guy is that, while trying to set some new distance record in a hot air balloon or something, he would inevitably need help from a rescue team because he ran out of fuel, blew off course, or, in the case of his Breitling Orbiter II flight in February 1998, was denied entry into Chinese airspace and thus risked an international incident.

And I would think about all of the resources being exhausted to find this guy, and wonder how all of that time, energy and manpower could have been put to better use instead of bailing out somebody who apparently didn't know what else to do with all of the time on his hands.

Well, no matter, Mullane said today...

Men of less ambition have portrayed Fossett as a millionaire thrill-seeker who collected world records the way some collected baseball cards. My guess is that many of them do not have the ability to fly a radio-controlled toy airplane, let alone have the testicular fortitude to take the controls of even a Cessna 150.

But I understand. Most of us play it safe. Side-impact air bags. Bike helmets for our kids. We live a belt-and-suspenders lifestyle. So when a guy like Fossett comes along, we're not sure what to think.

For the benefit of the uninitiated, I should note that it's a legal requirement, apparently, for J.D. to slam someone or something in a column whenever he's writing about something more substantial than bike trails, zoning ordinances, or wistfully recalling childhood memories of almost drowning in frozen creek beds while building a snow fort or impaling himself on a chain link fence while climbing over it to retrieve a whiffle ball (and just for the record, J.D., I don't own a pair of suspenders).

However, I will give J.D. a bit of a nod here and acknowledge that Fossett was a great adventurer. Good for him.

But as I've scanned through a bunch of archived columns in the New York Times, read through information on him at Wikipedia as well as his web site and perused other news accounts and opinion columns, something else struck me about Fossett.

Apparently, he gave absolutely nothing to charity (or, if he did, it somehow has never been publicized anywhere, which is remarkable).

No "Steve Fossett Foundation" or whatever to provide college scholarships or endowments to civic groups or community organizations. Nothing to help with disease and poverty efforts in Africa and third-world countries elsewhere. Nothing to promote tolerance and understanding of other faiths, cultures, gender orientations...whatever. Nothing to promote any kind of political ideology and thus engage in a discourse that could enlighten and inform others.

Oh sure, this guy received bushels of awards and citations. But I can't find any indication that he gave anything back (unless you consider some new expedition of his "giving back" somehow, and I don't).

I mean, sure, Fossett was allowed to engage in all of the "play time" that he wanted. But to return nothing for the privilege?

As far as I'm concerned, Steve Fossett's life was, first, last and in-between, a celebration of himself (and, as is usually the case with him, a whole bunch of rescue workers are trying to bail him out again from another mess, but I don't think they're going to be successful, though I don't wish for anything bad to happen to Fossett of course).

And if that's the kind of person Mullane looks up to as a role model, then that is sad indeed.

In the Wikipedia article on Fossett, his friend Richard Branson (a rich adventurer as well who at least gave back by helping, with Peter Gabriel, to finance a group called "The Elders" working to solve global conflicts; the group is chaired by Desmond Tutu) called Fossett "half-human."

I think Branson was right, though perhaps not in the way he intended.