"No work is insignificant."

This was posted on a MySpace discussion group:

"No work is insignificant. All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence."– Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Someone then asked, "What about when labor degrades human dignity"?

Then I remembered this story:

When I worked as an office intern during the summer, there was this hispanic janitor named Jose that cleaned our offices. He was a gentle, quiet man in his 60's, didn't talk much, and he was great at his job. The offices and restrooms were always clean and the waste baskets were always empty.

The next summer, we noticed that Jose wasn't there anymore. Our supervisor said that he had died, and we felt bad. And then our supervisor said that she just found out that he is actually a priest. He never told anyone in our office that he was a priest, and he never carried himself as holier than thou. Whatever his reasons, I have a feeling that his dignity went beyond his job.

After that, it's been easier for me to regard any job as having some sort of dignity. Even when I see crap TV shows, and even something like the Jerry Springer show, I think to myself, "There's a janitor or a sound guy or a caterer that will be able to feed their families because this show exists."

There are some very very negative aspects to some jobs, but I try to focus on how families are being fed and clothed because of sacrifices. When my white collar ego gets bloated and regards some jobs with distaste, I think about everyone else out there who aren't doing what they really want to do, and I count myself damn lucky. Damn, damn lucky.

The Information Age, Incomplete

In 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL9000, a computer in charge of piloting a ship and monitoring and regulating the life systems of a hibernating spaceship crew, winds up killing all but one member of that crew. It turns out that HAL9000, built as a sentient machine, received incomplete information that also conflicted with his original programming, and became paranoid.

We are now in the so-called Information Age, where everything is within our fingertips. We are able to receive any information we need, do anything we please, and especially in America and relative to the rest of the world, acquire nearly anything we want.

But have we received complete instructions to guide our actions?

Instructions are passed from generation to generation, from those who have learned from their mistakes, to those who hopefully will make less mistakes than their predecessors. This process, theoretically, will result in each subsequent generation improving on what the previous generation has built.

But if the method of transferring instructions becomes damaged, broken, or conflicted, then the subsequent generation will, like HAL9000, go koo-koo.

Worse yet, if the source of the original instructions was damaged to begin with, any subsequent instruction coming out of that source will be damaged.

Translation: if the correct instructions of a parent are not properly transferred to a child, then the prospect of improvement becomes damaged. Worse yet, if the parent was damaged to begin with, any subsequent instructions coming out of that parent will most likely be damaged.

If the parent communicates what is originally undamaged instructions, but the method of communication is incomplete or damaged, then the instructions become damaged.

If the parent properly communicates but the child is unable or unwilling to receive the instructions properly, the instructions become useless.

If a society disregards instructions from a previous generation, the current generation has no choice but to create new instructions from nothing.

A current generation that creates new instructions from nothing is like a computer that has to program itself.

It cannot.

We are living in an age where children, the new, empty computers, rule the world, are catered to by the media and advertising, and given tools with which they are able to program themselves, however they see fit. The children are told that they don’t have to listen to previous instructions (rules, guidelines, parental discretions), that they can do anything they want, when they want, how they want, and there is no criteria for success or failure (because that would be judgemental). There is no before and there doesn’t need to be an after. Instructions, after all, is the antithesis of freedom.

If HAL9000 were given these instructions, or lack thereof, we would not be surprised if he became paranoid and killed everyone on board. So why should we expect any different from our children?