responsibility

I am the only child of two oldest children. My parents had me at the age of 32 after a full decade of marriage. . . . all this to point out I have grown up in the environment of responsibility. This is fine and good. I'm glad that I've been taught the importance of planning for the future, family responsibility, etc. Still, here's where it's been breaking down for me lately. Every night when I clock in I take care of patients who have worked their whole lives in order to carefully plan out the comfortability of their own deaths. I don't know how death feels, but I feel quite certain that the process leading up to it sucks no matter how well planned out it may be.

My parents in their wisdom have long stressed to me the importance of having insurance and a retirement plan. This is wise since one unforseen event could financially wipe out an individual and their family if they are not insured. Since my parents are quite wealthy and have lots of possessions they don't want to lose, this is an ominous fear. Retirement is also needed, since the day will come when one cannot work, and it is guarenteed that medical bills will begin to increase as one's days come to a close.

I now work for a corporation who provides me with insurance and a retirement plan. This makes my parents with their 'oldest-children' complexes happy. I am now covered against unforseen events, and the forseen consequences of aging. Here is the problem: the cost.

My company ultimately doesn't really care much for me. I am a pawn that funnels money through the corporate rooks, knights, bishops, and queens, so that the anonymous king can have a bank account capable of ending hunger for the entire nation of Haiti. Sure, this company has an ethics committee which helps present the corporate machine with a 'human face'. Ultimately though this corporation like all corporations cares only that I provide the labor which allows them to survive the Darwinian world of corporate growth and competition. In front of my face lies a bundle of carrots: a steady check, insurance (safety), a family (the duty of all humankind), and a retirement. True they are ethical enough to allow me to eat these carrots, at least enough to keep me fueled up, so I can proceed to pull this burden behind me.

Should I choose to reject this corporate patronage, I must then face the scary world on my own. I would lose my insurance and therefore my sense of safety. I would lose my paycheck, reminding me how good a carrot tastes now and then to overworked corporate ass. I would cease to be able to provide for a family, and thus cease to be of any appeal to the average American female. Threaten a man's access to sex and he typically will do whatever the corporate figureheads expect of him. Listening to my coworkers daily is a good case study in this. Last, but not least, I lose my retirement plan, and thus am doomed to face death with no morphine to numb the pain, and no nurse to wipe my ass and change my sheets.

So, the responsible thing to do is remain a volutary slave to the corporate world so I can be assured of food, sex, safety and a numb but drawn out death.

I see it every night, patients who were responsible enough to plan out their death. They lie in bed disoriented and slightly helpless. In so far as they are capable of helping themselves they amount to a liability. The process of numbing one to impending death typically involves making them too unstable to walk to the bathroom, and broken hips tend to be the beginning of the end for most people. These are people who have worked a 9 to 5 for decades. Mindlessly they attended a job. They performed the role of a cog which found a place in the structure of a company that was more alive than they. We sell our souls to a system so our needs can be provided for.

I don't plan to quit my job in the immediate future, and I still like the idea of having a retirement accout and insurance. Still, I don't think I am willing to value these forms of safety above living from my heart or living for the sake of dreams. There is more to life than trying to die comfortably. There is more to life than raising a family to prepetuate the social system as it now stands. I don't think the system is all bad, only it much too easily becomes a way to live without taking into consideration how one truly wishes to live. I don't wish to live in such a way as to remain a slave to a corporation for fear that I won't eat, have what I need, enjoy sex and family, or die well. It is a fallacy that corporations and their meticulous plans have successfully bought up all the good things in the world. All their promises of safety and provision are illusions. I daily take care of people who prove that no insurance plan, nor retirement can give meaning to life. No family can suffice to answer all the deep questions of soul. The truth remains that living is dangerous. Insurance is good, but the safety it provides only robs life of its needed poetic character. We all die, but when we die is there anything poetic or meaningful we are living towards? Is our life set on a trajectory toward something beautiful, or is it merely cowering in the face of the unknown which surrounds us?

God is no Stoic. There is something about him that is wild and free. We delude ourselves thinking that his greatest wish is for our safety, as though any story worth reading has ever been about people living in safety. God transcends the peaceful stillness of a lake at dawn and the torrent of a raging waterfall. He is both and more. I look at all our attempts to dam up the rivers and make them peaceful. God is no respecter of safety, and insofar as I live my life solely to maintain safety and peace, I am denying God.

The responsible thing to do is to live peacefully in the midst of chaos, and live untamed amidst the comfortability of all-too-domesticated world.