To obey or not obey......
I remember back in the day meeting my cousin Gerry for coffee at the Country Kitchen (i think it was called that) restaurant in Saskatoon.
It was one of those grey almost spring days with a touch of heat in the air, the sight of snow, smell of wet pavement and the feel of slush lapping over the tops of your shoes.
Gerry strode in and navigated around the anxious young teens in new sneakers and jeans and older farmers with the dust from last harvest still lingering in their John Deere hats, he came to the table smiling but not as usual.
This day he seemed smiling but not his wholehearted deep rooted genuine smile. This was a smile that I rarely if ever saw, the surface smile, his face was doing what it should but his eyes were not smiling. He hadn't found all the good things and make his whole being happy, He's truly extraordinary in this regard and it's something which I must bow and tip my hat to because it has taken me a life time to acquire the basic skills to project a convincingly happy image when I am NOT.
"Hey Gerry!" " Hey Gord, man the roads are shit eh so much slush"
I won't bore you and myself with a load of dialogue, I can write it but it doesn't bring us any closer to the point of this post.
I asked him about the job He'd started with a vacuum sales outfit about a month before.
Something that seems significant to this story is the economic setting of the time. It was fucking HARD to find anything for work we are talking the mid 70's in the middle of Saskatchewan! At the time I was living off of EI (UI at that time) and welfare.
He looked at me and the smile vanished his brow became furrowed and as he shook his head from side to side he exhaled a short sentence "I had to leave it!", this was a shock.
I asked him what had happened all the while in my mind thinking back to my time as a vacuum cleaner salesman. More personal stuff.
Yes I was a door to door salesman and supremely horrible at it. My sales strategy was if a person said no they must mean no, my handler seemed to think otherwise. So I had no sales and consequently no job and thought that this was what I was about to hear from my more success driven cousin.
"So what happened no sales, I mean the economy is worse than when I was in sales"
He looked a little mean as he saw what I was doing.
I was being a little prick trying to elevate my failure by having someone more success driven fail in the same way I did.
The shot I got from him took me back to my younger than those years when I was boxing.
Yes as a kid I took up some time at a boxing gym and I remember the first time I took a good shot to the head, with head gear of course, that feeling of a pillow on your cheek and then the fucking brick behind it rattles yer cage shakes you to your toes and things become so very clear and all offense is forgiven as you go through that dance of finding your ground.
"No Gord I didn't go to cold calls with long hair, jeans and the smell of pot hanging around me." He said that with a sneer and I'm not fond of sneering. "Hey man I did try the appearance thing I just wasn't into the bullshit of pretty much forcing someone to buy something they don't need."
He now looked disarmed. The explosion was averted the wire cut more by chance than design.
He agreed with my stand, WTF!!! Gerry and I would have heated, nearly shoving, arguments and so I was surprised at his backing down.
He told me a tale that tugged at my heart and showed the true nature of someone who is a capitalist and not a corporate zombie.
"Sales were really great! The first two weeks I had a ton of orders being processed, that end was good."
My next thought was that they were slow in paying for his sales but that was not really the problem.
In his third week or so he had to go and repossess a vacuum.
It was a young Mom with one on the way in a clean place who had a husband who was trying to make things as good as possible. Just plain good people who will work til their dying day. These are the people who my cousin would at times ridicule, hey we were all young once.
The kid was crying because Gerry was taking their cleaner and she was upset because
"he is looking so hard for full time work and the salesman said we could afford it no problem, couldn't you give us another month"
Now this is where the story may really drift from fact but the way I see it by the intent of my cousins heart I should be able to embellish on the actual events if not for that reason then for the fact that I simply don't remember what happened in detail.
He looked intently at the paper in his hand and he realized that these folks had already paid a good chunk of the principal amount, he did a quick calculation. His eyes went from the essence of what is human and good to the vacuum to the paper and then to the door.
He didn't say much as he left "You have a good day keep care of those little ones and don't worry about this anymore, you deserve this vacuum so you keep it.."
He went back to the office and on the way signed off the bill. He let them take it from his pay and said good bye to door to door sales.
Gerry really did do something like that and it is something that we all need to do more of.
There are times when respectable people are pressed to do less than respectable things to be paid.
But a line has to be drawn more so by those who are in a position of authority but still all of us need to think about the morality of our work.
Strive to make any work as good as possible knowing that sometimes it means self sacrifice.
There are exceptions but few where "Do or Die" is part of the job description.
One primary, almost global exception:
We have seen the question in the USA of what do you call the fallen in the Iraq war?
I personally think that this is something very unfair, it is a situation where there are real repercussions if you do not follow an order. Not just the kind where your ass is in a military prison but where peoples lives may be risked for your sudden sense of morality. As for those who joined freely and were killed in a largely defined unjust war it is the same. These are not people who in large numbers were out to kill people but people who went to do a job and by law had to execute orders given. Then as they drove a vehicle fulfilling said orders they hit a mine and lost their life.
I have a feeling that a lot of these fallen soldiers have been new recruits and so I wonder what their thoughts were about the war while enlisting. Another feeling that I have is that as much as some of them might put on a true patriotic face while doing military work a lot of them are simply WORKING. Bringing home a paycheck and yeah they went through basic but still they just drive the truck or spin wrenches or fix radios etc. and then end up dead.
These are, by and large, honorable respectable people who work for some very dishonorable, despicable, disrespectful, psychopaths. There is no need to dishonor their intentions and there by, in many cases, dishonor their lives.
History will dishonor the dishonorable and will question openly the intent of those individuals who were all cogs in the war machine.
This brings me to one last point that is probably or at least logically brought up.
What about those involved with the Nazi's and the concentration death camps?
History has shown that the people of Germany at the time were hit with a propaganda machine that the world had never seen before. Even so there were those who saw through it and really saw the inhumanity in the treatment of the Jews and other races but it took time for that history to be common knowledge.
Who, if we were judgmental, would be the larger criminal or better yet the lesser hero?
A German soldier carrying out orders on the Russian front and dying in a very unjust fucked up war?
The politician with free will to do the right thing who doesn't?
The soldiers at the concentration camps?
The general population of Germany back in the 40's?
As you dissect this time in history you see that there might be some horrible truths about the human psyche and also a complexity of individual actions. By that I mean it is not as though no one in the country of Germany had more than an inkling that these Nazi guys were more than a bit messed up!
That is repeated through out history in every war. One day my neighbor is ok the next day he's a pariah and the reason this has happened through history is because there's one thing all wars have in common
THEY MAKE NO FUCKING SENSE!
It was one of those grey almost spring days with a touch of heat in the air, the sight of snow, smell of wet pavement and the feel of slush lapping over the tops of your shoes.
Gerry strode in and navigated around the anxious young teens in new sneakers and jeans and older farmers with the dust from last harvest still lingering in their John Deere hats, he came to the table smiling but not as usual.
This day he seemed smiling but not his wholehearted deep rooted genuine smile. This was a smile that I rarely if ever saw, the surface smile, his face was doing what it should but his eyes were not smiling. He hadn't found all the good things and make his whole being happy, He's truly extraordinary in this regard and it's something which I must bow and tip my hat to because it has taken me a life time to acquire the basic skills to project a convincingly happy image when I am NOT.
"Hey Gerry!" " Hey Gord, man the roads are shit eh so much slush"
I won't bore you and myself with a load of dialogue, I can write it but it doesn't bring us any closer to the point of this post.
I asked him about the job He'd started with a vacuum sales outfit about a month before.
Something that seems significant to this story is the economic setting of the time. It was fucking HARD to find anything for work we are talking the mid 70's in the middle of Saskatchewan! At the time I was living off of EI (UI at that time) and welfare.
He looked at me and the smile vanished his brow became furrowed and as he shook his head from side to side he exhaled a short sentence "I had to leave it!", this was a shock.
I asked him what had happened all the while in my mind thinking back to my time as a vacuum cleaner salesman. More personal stuff.
Yes I was a door to door salesman and supremely horrible at it. My sales strategy was if a person said no they must mean no, my handler seemed to think otherwise. So I had no sales and consequently no job and thought that this was what I was about to hear from my more success driven cousin.
"So what happened no sales, I mean the economy is worse than when I was in sales"
He looked a little mean as he saw what I was doing.
I was being a little prick trying to elevate my failure by having someone more success driven fail in the same way I did.
The shot I got from him took me back to my younger than those years when I was boxing.
Yes as a kid I took up some time at a boxing gym and I remember the first time I took a good shot to the head, with head gear of course, that feeling of a pillow on your cheek and then the fucking brick behind it rattles yer cage shakes you to your toes and things become so very clear and all offense is forgiven as you go through that dance of finding your ground.
"No Gord I didn't go to cold calls with long hair, jeans and the smell of pot hanging around me." He said that with a sneer and I'm not fond of sneering. "Hey man I did try the appearance thing I just wasn't into the bullshit of pretty much forcing someone to buy something they don't need."
He now looked disarmed. The explosion was averted the wire cut more by chance than design.
He agreed with my stand, WTF!!! Gerry and I would have heated, nearly shoving, arguments and so I was surprised at his backing down.
He told me a tale that tugged at my heart and showed the true nature of someone who is a capitalist and not a corporate zombie.
"Sales were really great! The first two weeks I had a ton of orders being processed, that end was good."
My next thought was that they were slow in paying for his sales but that was not really the problem.
In his third week or so he had to go and repossess a vacuum.
It was a young Mom with one on the way in a clean place who had a husband who was trying to make things as good as possible. Just plain good people who will work til their dying day. These are the people who my cousin would at times ridicule, hey we were all young once.
The kid was crying because Gerry was taking their cleaner and she was upset because
"he is looking so hard for full time work and the salesman said we could afford it no problem, couldn't you give us another month"
Now this is where the story may really drift from fact but the way I see it by the intent of my cousins heart I should be able to embellish on the actual events if not for that reason then for the fact that I simply don't remember what happened in detail.
He looked intently at the paper in his hand and he realized that these folks had already paid a good chunk of the principal amount, he did a quick calculation. His eyes went from the essence of what is human and good to the vacuum to the paper and then to the door.
He didn't say much as he left "You have a good day keep care of those little ones and don't worry about this anymore, you deserve this vacuum so you keep it.."
He went back to the office and on the way signed off the bill. He let them take it from his pay and said good bye to door to door sales.
Gerry really did do something like that and it is something that we all need to do more of.
There are times when respectable people are pressed to do less than respectable things to be paid.
But a line has to be drawn more so by those who are in a position of authority but still all of us need to think about the morality of our work.
Strive to make any work as good as possible knowing that sometimes it means self sacrifice.
There are exceptions but few where "Do or Die" is part of the job description.
One primary, almost global exception:
We have seen the question in the USA of what do you call the fallen in the Iraq war?
I personally think that this is something very unfair, it is a situation where there are real repercussions if you do not follow an order. Not just the kind where your ass is in a military prison but where peoples lives may be risked for your sudden sense of morality. As for those who joined freely and were killed in a largely defined unjust war it is the same. These are not people who in large numbers were out to kill people but people who went to do a job and by law had to execute orders given. Then as they drove a vehicle fulfilling said orders they hit a mine and lost their life.
I have a feeling that a lot of these fallen soldiers have been new recruits and so I wonder what their thoughts were about the war while enlisting. Another feeling that I have is that as much as some of them might put on a true patriotic face while doing military work a lot of them are simply WORKING. Bringing home a paycheck and yeah they went through basic but still they just drive the truck or spin wrenches or fix radios etc. and then end up dead.
These are, by and large, honorable respectable people who work for some very dishonorable, despicable, disrespectful, psychopaths. There is no need to dishonor their intentions and there by, in many cases, dishonor their lives.
History will dishonor the dishonorable and will question openly the intent of those individuals who were all cogs in the war machine.
This brings me to one last point that is probably or at least logically brought up.
What about those involved with the Nazi's and the concentration death camps?
History has shown that the people of Germany at the time were hit with a propaganda machine that the world had never seen before. Even so there were those who saw through it and really saw the inhumanity in the treatment of the Jews and other races but it took time for that history to be common knowledge.
Who, if we were judgmental, would be the larger criminal or better yet the lesser hero?
A German soldier carrying out orders on the Russian front and dying in a very unjust fucked up war?
The politician with free will to do the right thing who doesn't?
The soldiers at the concentration camps?
The general population of Germany back in the 40's?
As you dissect this time in history you see that there might be some horrible truths about the human psyche and also a complexity of individual actions. By that I mean it is not as though no one in the country of Germany had more than an inkling that these Nazi guys were more than a bit messed up!
That is repeated through out history in every war. One day my neighbor is ok the next day he's a pariah and the reason this has happened through history is because there's one thing all wars have in common
THEY MAKE NO FUCKING SENSE!
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