Ruminations-Armistice Day 2021

Today is November 11. Armistice Day to many countries around the world.

Armistice Day is so named to celebrate the armistice signed between the Allies of World War I and Germany at Compiègne, France, for the cessation of hostilities on the Western Front of World War I, which took effect at eleven in the morning—the "eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month" of 1918. Many Western countries have changed the name of the holiday from Armistice Day, with member states of the Commonwealth of Nations adopting Remembrance Day, and Veterans Day in the US. Changing the name of the day subtly changes the intended meaning of the day. Armistice Day is about remembering the end of the war to end all wars — an optimistic mis-foreshadowing if there ever was one. Remembrance Day evokes those who lost their lives in defense of their beliefs. In putting the names of the days in context, the first great war dealt an extensive blow to the psyche of the European continent. A hundred plus years later, the effect of the war is still affecting the way Europeans think, react, and feel whenever large human conflicts are the subject of discussion. It affects the way they memorialize the day, with the subtle pinning of the red poppy flower on the lapels of the general populace and remembrances of the war dead in the battlefields.

In the US, the turning of the day into Veteran’s Day changes the focus of the day to the living veterans, even though the remembrance of those who died are never far from the surface: such activities as the many ceremonies placing flags on the graves of those who died fighting the war and the remembrances at the war memorials and tombs of unknown soldiers — the focus is clearly on honoring the living veterans; a chance to give thanks to those who had survived.

This is a clear illustration of the pragmatic bent of the American culture. My thought is that by culture, we Americans as a people are not so inclined to be elegiac. We are a culture of action, doing what is practical and immediate. Hence the turn towards honoring the living is a far more practical thing to do on this day of remembrance than contemplating the past. This is not an indictment; indeed, it is very natural for our cultural personality. Afterall, pragmatism is an American philosophy.

As I think about this, I think about the inadvertent omissions in our thoughts when we changed the name of the day. By changing the name of the day, we unintentionally change our internal conversations with ourselves about the meaning of sacrifice, or the altruistic nature of responsibility and commitment. We miss the necessary discussions about the meaning of  altruism and the psychic demands placed on those who willingly sacrifice their most precious possession, their lives, in the service of a greater good, fully knowing and understanding the role that they will play in the future of civilization. Sometimes I think about those who have passed as they are observing our present in which we are living and wondering whether they think if it was worth their altruism.

On a greater stage, I think about the role of the armed conflict in our society. Of the role that our organized fighting forces play in our own geopolitical chess match. We make noble the cause by waxing poetic about those who willingly give their all, sacrificing their individual good for the benefit of our greater good — fully knowing that their lives may be the price they pay. What very few contemplate in times of geopolitical conflict is the role and responsibility of the leaders; their need to critically self-question, to contemplate the need  to minimize the call upon those who are willing because every life is valuable, every loss of life is too costly. I would hazard to guess that the best of our leaders, both military and civilian, are kept awake at night, contemplating the intricate calculus of making their decisions in the widest and narrowest contexts possible. Yet, I also know that there are blackhearts who does not even think of the sacrifices of the altruistic and haphazardously commit the lives of other humans in the service of their own vainglorious self-serving purposes.

Another thought that crops up is the formalism that we place on the day and on our responses on the day. All around the world, we honor the war dead on November 11, which leads to many other questions. Why don’t we honor the war dead on the other 364 days of the year? Who are we memorializing? Unless the person who had passed is a relative or a friend, there is actually very little or no remembrances of their person or their deeds. Are we going through these exercises to assuage our own guilt for living rather than give remembrance to the dead? What if we took that emotion and exercise in remembrance and turned the attention to the lessons that we ought to have learned and propagated to the future regarding the meaning of the self-sacrifice that the headstones concretely exemplify? Are we deriving the lessons that we should be deriving from the lessons of altruism we are observing?

One thing that has bothered me throughout the years is the obligation that we have imbued our interactions with living veterans. Many are sincere when they say” “Thank you for your service.” While I have no arguments with the sentiment, I wonder if we are commoditizing that sentiment by making it an obligation to say the phrase to anyone that has been identified as a veteran. Once again, are we parroting the phrase for our own benefit because we feel it is our obligation? No doubt there is ample sincerity in the spoken gesture, but how much of it is due to the obligation that we feel?

In my mind, parroting the phrase reactively is a conversation stopper. It pre-emptively arrests any further discussions into the war experience, the horrors and negativity associated with armed conflicts are stopped cold in their tracks because the speaker has met their obligation to laud the veteran for their service. Indeed, it stops all kinds of conversations, conversations about how many veterans with PTSD are living in the streets because we —the people who make up the government — are unwilling to face the realities of the aftermath of war, we would rather sweep it under the national rug. Conversations about the suicide rates of veterans. Conversations about how we are taking care of the veterans for the rest of their lives.

It is worth saying that the idea of the volunteer army is that those who are willing are depending on those who are unwilling or unable, to meet needs of the willing after the war. Needs that are a result of the decision to commit the willing to the conflict; the after-effect imposed upon those who are willing. This is not a partisan issue, both sides of the wide political divide have failed abysmally in this regard. Those on both sides of the political chasm have taken every chance to make a cape of the flag and performing in their own self-directed political drama while running away from the responsibilities of their positions.

To conclude, I am not saying that calling November 11 Remembrance Day assures that the general populace will naturally conform to contemplating the greater meanings of personal altruism that motivates the willing to give up their lives. I am also not saying that everyone who says: “Thank You for Your Service” are disingenuous in their intent. I am not a veteran, so I can not speak for their emotions as they hear that phrase. I am speaking to my own skepticism of the intent of some when I sense that they are parroting the phrase as an obligation. 

I am, however, serious about using the day as a day of reflection on the meaning of altruism, service to the greater good of society rather than to the self as a regular habit on this day, once a year. I don’t think it is too much to ask.

Ruminations-People Just Don’t Want to Work

In one of my text group chats with some friends, the conversation on remote and live work evolved into a discussion on people not wanting to work, how it impacts our economy, and our society. I thought that trope had died when the unemployment benefits that was enacted as a response to the  COVID pandemic ended, and yet the job market remained wide open. The inference there is that people are willing to not work in order to find better work because the crutch that some have assumed is propping them up had gone away.

Indeed, the media has started to call the phenomenon: “The Great Resignation”. By the reports, and many anecdotal stories that I had pieced together, workers, especially in the service industries had time off, initially without any unemployment aid. In that time off they had reflected upon the state of the labor-management relationship. It surprised me to learn just how many people are living hand to mouth, without health insurance, benefits, a steady work schedule and by that implication: without a steady week-to-week income. It made many of them rethink and reconfigure their expectations of the future. It took the involuntary time off from the grind to realize that they were in a grind. Many took advantage of the unemployment to restructure their goals and started to look for more permanent and secure jobs. Jobs that can turn into careers. I would not call that not wanting to work or by implication, laziness that permeates throughout the work force. I would call that working to make the American dream come true, pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, to use a well-worn cliché of the haves of the world.

Turning the lens towards the reason that people would question the intent of the workers who had decided to change their lives, I thought about why would anyone think in this manner? It does not come from a place of empathy for our fellow citizens. Indeed, it is also lacking the inherent thought of: there but for the grace of God go I. I then thought about the framework that created this thought. The thinker of the thought framed it as a matter of us against them. In the context of the initial discussion, it was comparing and setting an adversarial frame of  the low age, not highly educated, blue-collar workers versus the higher wage, highly educated, white-collar worker. The disconnect is that despite the initial assumptions, both sets of workers are workers, some may have a say in the management at their workplace, but in the end, we are all workers working for the company. So, the disconnect is evidence of an interesting prism by which some workers view others. In a away it reaffirms the suspicion that the upper management manipulates the middle management to antagonize the workers in order to maintain control of the hierarchy, while the middle management and the workers are happily warring against each other unconscious of the intent. Indeed, that is quite  bit of conspiracy theory, but the scenario is not so out of the realm of possibilities to contemplate.

In a bit of irony, if not outright hypocrisy on the part of society, is that these very service workers were lauded if not worshipped as heroes and essential workers when the rest of society needed them to stay at their work in the middle of the pandemic to serve our essential needs. We, being  in the uncomfortable but safe quarantine at our homes, while they are exposed in the open to the unknowns and dealing with a much higher probability of infections. For all our laudatory rhetoric, many of the essential workers received temporary boosts in pay and media exposure, but as soon as it was deemed expedient, those boosts in pay stopped and the wages went back to pre-pandemic levels. How would one process this whiplash change in attitude? Once they were celebrated, and just as suddenly, they returned to being anonymous, disposable, and made out to be an example of what not to do. I would say that a great resignation is a logical step if they wished to advance themselves in this society.

During all this time, the inviolable assumption, the bedrock of our belief, is that the business model that has existed is the only one that makes economic sense; that the only way for the service industries to make enough profit is the status quo. As the recent employment market and its attendant effect on our economy has shown, the key to giving service to the customer is through the workers, and yet people hang on to the old paradigm because that is all they know, and no one has thought about creating a new business model which would give the service workers a living wage. I remember when the talk of a $15 an hour minimum wage was scandalous, and yet today we have corporations who own fast food franchise raise their pay to $17 and $19 an hour just to attract workers. Maybe the old business model was erroneous or driven by greed? Or the employers were disingenuous? It would be interesting to see if the employers would have the greed to drop the wages if and when the employment needs ease, or would they keep the adjustments they made to their business model which enabled them to make profit despite the rise in wages in place.

One of my friends on the chat brought out the fact that his industry is paying excellent wages and still they were having difficulties attracting workers. I wouldn’t hazard to guess at the reason. I don’t know the skillsets they require of their workers, and I don’t know the micro-economics of that particular industry. Perhaps those workers are also having a revelatory moment in their lives, perhaps they are restructuring their plans for the future, I don’t know. I do know that the Great Resignation is happening across the board. Many of my highly skilled, highly educated, and highly compensated friends are changing jobs recently. Maybe they are taking advantage of the reversal in the relationship between employers and employees. The advantage is with the employees now, who knows when that would reverse itself again, so it is better to strike while the iron is hot rather than wait. The truth is that history has shown that the employers have no compunction about going back to depressing wages in their efforts to maximize profits. No empathy wanted or needed.

Another initial assumption by employers is that money is the sole motivator for the employee, that everything can be resolved if more money is offered. I am not going to be ridiculous and say that money does not matter, it does. But it does not matter when compared to other things. In our society we value human dignity, or we say we do. We are not as good at showing what we value as we are at talking about it. Talking about valuing human dignity does not translate to showing. Remember the whiplashing of wages that I spoke about for the essential workers? How demeaning is that? We will pay you more because you are putting yourself in the line of fire, and when you are not in the line of fire, we won’t pay you. Is it any wonder that they are not going back to that particular industry?

How about security, stability, means to plan for a future. It is impossible within the existing economic system for the service workers to  live and build for a future, any future. If they are lucky, they can tread water; by lucky I mean work multiple jobs and not become ill.  Is it any wonder that they want to leave this grind?

Another irony I wish to point out is that those who are in business ceaselessly admonish that we need to let the free market work its magic, that the invisible hand would inevitably restore the balance, yet when the free market is working against their interests, they balk and complain about those people who are the foundations of their companies and our economies, the front-line workers. Maybe it isn’t the people that is the problem, maybe it is the economic system.

The pandemic has shown that the present system is fragile to a fault. While the system may be able to withstand minimal perturbations, something as large as the pandemic and the resulting unintended aftereffects have effectively sidelined what we believed to be indestructible.

So now what? We can wait for the wave of uncertainty and its lingering effects to subside, if it subsides. Or we can reinvent our business models and processes, taking care to design in anti-fragile features and learn to adjust as the situation warrants. The former is the hold on to what has always worked model even though the reality has evolved away from historical precedent, the latter is the make stuff up as we go along model even though we don’t know what will and will not work in the long term.