Justice for Delta Dawn (the One From the Song)

Stuart K. Hayashi



The famous old song “Delta Dawn” is about a woman who says she and a rich man are in love, and one day he’ll take her away from the town. The chorus is the townspeople mocking her as lying or delusional. They don’t believe the rich suitor even exists. My late father disliked that cruelty, so he wrote his own “final verse” where the rich man does arrive for her. She was telling the truth all along, and justice prevails. My father’s lyrics go, 

Then one night as she walked along the street
a dark limousine pulled alongside Delta’s feet
and she got inside with her suitcase in her hand
sitting beside a mysterious dark-haired man
Where she’s gone to this day no one knows
All that was left on the pavement was a faded rose
Since the man in the limousine took her away
nevermore did the folks have the chance to say: 

[Leading into the actual chorus] “Delta Dawn
what’s that flower you have on?
Could it be a faded rose from days gone by?
And didn’t I hear you say
he was a-meeting you here today
to take you to his mansion in the sky?”

I Am Influenced By Everyone Except Me?

Stuart K. Hayashi

Many people — this is common among my fellow Japanese-Americans, though I doubt it’s exclusive to my ethnicity — implicitly subscribe to a logical fallacy that can be phrased as: “your own choices were not the main factor in shaping whom you are as an adult; rather, the personalities of all adults were ultimately shaped by their parents [and/or teachers and/or neighbors, etc.].” This is a fallacy because, if it were true, then you wouldn’t ultimately be shaped by your parents, as your own parents would have been shaped by their own parents, meaning you were ultimately shaped by your grandparents, except your grandparents themselves were also shaped . . . [etc.] It would go on and on, until the first humans, or even the first apes, or the first fishes, etc.

What’s happening is that agency is being denied to the individual by presuming that the individual is shaped by everyone around her but not she herself. The unspoken premise is that those “others” do have agency, free will. And yet, if you ask what influenced the action of one of those “others,” you’ll be told it wasn’t that person’s agency, but still-other-parties influencing the person, etc. But in reality, even as others influence you, your volition is front and center. The party that has the most direct control over your actions is you yourself.

Insofar as you can influence anyone else, such control is indirect at the most. By contrast, you have direct control over your own choices. And your small choices, added up over time, become your personality overall. Hence, your direct control over your own choices, and therefore personality, has exerted a more direct control over your personality than have the influences external to you.

If Person A has no volition — which includes Person A’s ability to modify her own behavior — Person A cannot influence Person B. The individual’s volition has primacy over the ability of anyone to influence anyone else.

The next time you hear someone say, “What gave you your personality as an adult wasn’t the choices you made as an adult, but instead the influence of of those around you since your childhood,” remember that this is a Stolen Concept. The ability of anyone to influence anyone else’s character is something that presupposes every adult’s capacity for making choices that shape and reshape that very same adult’s personality.

If you have volition, then you can change your behavior. That means the person most responsible for your personality as an adult is you. Hence it’s a fallacy when people talk as if your personality as an adult is shaped less by you than the wider culture (everyone but you). Others influence you, but individual volition is what prefigures anyone’s ability to influence anyone else. This is because Person A’s ability to influence the personality development of others is no greater than her ability to influence that of herself.