My Dad was born in 1904 in Belarus and lived through the Russian Revolution and several other wars working in a slave factory in Germany toward the end of WW2 and with his wife and little kids spent seven years as a refugee after the war. He was a gentle man which led to great difficulties working in factories here in the States. He was a hard worker and looked for every opportunity to work extra hours to better care for his family. This angered his coworkers and they created a hell for him at work, teasing him and sabotaging the machines he worked with. He wasn’t a complainer and when recalling the past, he would talk about the better experiences but sometimes he allowed himself to remember the painful parts.
There was one story he told often with more pain on his face than I saw with any of the other recollections. When he was a young man he worked as a clerk in the office of the President of Belarus. After the end of one of the wars, I think it was with Poland, the army was demobilized and men returned to peacetime jobs. Returning from the war were also political operatives, members of the NKVD (the Soviet equivalent of the CIA), who were getting jobs in the government. A senior NKVD officer took over as Chief of Staff and brought with him his cronies. One day my Dad found himself with an assignment to train one of them and it was obvious that this was an end to his job. Unlike him, he got very angry and refused to do this, the new Chief of Staff fired him (the only time he was ever fired) and in his document wrote “you are not a clerk, you are an inconsequential person”. Under the totalitarian Soviet Regime, documents were required for everything. You couldn’t move from one place to another or job to job without them. One of the things I love about our Country is that, unless you drive you can live your whole life without needing any kind of papers though today there are people trying to change this. I believe of all his great pains he suffered (some of which were caused by me) being designated an “inconsequential person” bothered him the most.
I don’t believe my father was unique in his feelings. Every day through our actions and words, intentionally or unintentionally, we make people feel inconsequential. We do this when people become instruments for our agenda. A cabby is indistinguishable from the cab and just a way to get to the airport instead of a person who is driving us there. Employees are just hands used to achieve the corporate goals. Apparently insignificant words or actions by a parent can make children feel inconsequential and it may take a lifetime, if ever to reverse this. I remember a number of years ago I toured the Astor Mansion in Newport RI where the guide explained that the Astor family had a large number of servants. The inside male servants wore the same uniforms and were all called Jives, while the outside servants were called James. The same held for the female staff. All inside maids were Mary and outside help were named something else. To the Asters, these people were inconsequential. How sad for the Astors.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Inconsequential People
Posted by PoliticAli at 8:12 PM
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2 comments:
i try to make an explicit point of not treating other people inconsequentially. hopefully this isnt a result of some suppressed fear of my own, rather as a belief that being human means having value, at least in the absence of any evidence that would prove otherwise.. :-)
i think its especially sad when people buy into this concept of inconsequence and believe it spawns from within themselves (personally, i believe people are probably born without it and can only 'achieve' it via how they are treated by others.. but i'll have to think about that some more--its possible simply coming to the realization of the complexity and vastness and sometimes absurdity of our world and universe might evoke similar feelings).
it does seem quite odd that there would be people or groups who intentionally create inconsequence to support a world-view (eg astors or similar). if that is not some kind of twisted sense of entitlement, i dont know what is.
Hi Navigio; You’ve given me some food for thought. Why was my Dad so hurt by the “inconsequential” designation? First, I am not sure I properly interpreted the Russian term used in his case. It may have been more accurate to use ‘insignificant” or “undifferentiated”. I believe you are right in that it is not the designation assigned but the feeling it elicited. It may have reinforced already existing anxieties. I guess the key point is that however it is aroused, when aroused the feeling of insignificance is powerful.
At work we had as a guiding principle of treating everyone with dignity and respect. Making anyone in anyway feel inconsequential would have been contrary to that principle. (I wonder, in retrospect, to what extent this was influenced my Dad’s pain?) I don’t mean to suggest that we always succeeded but at least we were conscious of the need to do so. People tend to focus on the “act” or the “word” rather than their consequences. If I am in the company of bikers and in conversation they refer to my wife as my “old lady” I take no offense but in the company of lawyers the same words would have a totally different meaning and I would go through the roof. My thoughts in formulating the policy, was that we are all people and anything done to diminish us is undignified and disrespectful and therefore inappropriate.
Going off on a tangent, from a different perspective, looking at man over our entire existence, we and everything we do is indeed totally inconsequential. I remember reading a book by Dean Koontz in which a friend of the hero, a wealthy surfer, upon hearing the hero comment on the greatness of a piece of music, said it was just noise. When confronted with Beethoven, he gave the same response. To the great paintings his comment was “graffiti”. I believe we are faced with two realities we have to reconcile. The Buddhists articulate and manage this well with their notion of emptiness and an understanding that nothing is real in the absolute but we have the day to day reality of suffering to deal with which we can mitigate through “proper” thought, words and actions.
Though indeed everything is emptiness made up of swirling energy and maybe a tiny bit of matter, we are comprised of this stuff in a way that we perceive what we perceive and suffer through these perceptions. (I comment on the notion of emptiness in an early post “If a Tree Falls in the Forest”.) Our own views and actions can decrease this suffering and others through their words and actions can lead us to feel inconsequential and thus increase our suffering.
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