Fujiko Suda: Worklife

Globalization

Jul 05, 2003 10:12 am / Add a comment

Maybe it was 15 years ago. I have dis­tinct mem­ory of the images of thick, moist African jun­gle, man grimy from long and hard travel on path­less way, blue hope­ful but fear­ful eyes on lean face, all on the tele­vi­sion screen. The man said:

“Dr. Liv­ingston, I presume?”

It was a doc­u­men­tary about pius life of Dr. Liv­ingston who wanted to save and offer eter­nal life to the sav­age Africans by con­vert­ing them into Chris­tians, and about slave hunters fol­low­ing Dr. Livinston’s path in pur­suit of pros­per­ous business.

The con­trast shocked me, good, kind, deter­mined man ver­sus greedy, self serv­ing men. And there are those who served these men for liv­ing. Their paths fol­lowed one another, each fixed in his own mission.

I was dis­tressed that a mere tele­vi­sion show had such pro­found effect on me, but the effect was so pow­er­ful, the images and the les­son stayed with me all these years. Good and evil are two sides of a coin. One does not exist with­out the other. Noth­ing new about this thought, it is so preva­lent in Asian reli­gion, Bud­dhaism, Tao­ism. But only after hav­ing expe­ri­enced irony in daily life often enough, then to have that one reveal­ing les­son that hit the right place at the right time, will one learn.

Per­haps that is what glob­al­iza­tion is. Good will be fol­lowed with greed, local peo­ple just try­ing to make a liv­ing. In try­ing to pur­sue envi­ron­ment to some­how improve the qual­ity of peo­ple work­ing in call cen­ters, I am dis­tressed with all the polit­i­cal fac­tors, each with fixed mission.

This is the les­son I have been try­ing hard to learn for years and years. Who am I to force my views onto these peo­ple? Each per­son has his own lessons to learn. I hate polit­i­cal fac­tors where peo­ple are so deter­mined to gain an upper hand. When all is said and done, what does my work mean? What dif­fer­ence am I really mak­ing? Am I spend­ing my time wisely, on this kind of work and not more time with kids, fam­ily? Am I mak­ing dif­fer­ence in anybody’s life with my work?

Glob­al­iza­tion seems like another Dr. Liv­ingston, except this time, it is not in the name of God.

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