huge trucks, left and right
north and south, run me over
daily life at work

The commute is bad enough but the real traffic problems often don’t start until I get to work.

Imagine a tic-tac-toe grid.

I am standing in center square and there is a land mine in all the other squares.

My first email of the day says, ‘take one step in any direction.’

Complicating the issue is the inbred all American feeling of work place justice.

A feeling that this situation isn’t right, it isn’t fair.

I don’t have to put up with this.

I am not going to put up with this.

The notion persists that THEY can’t treat me this way.

This is the country of The Caine Mutiny after all.

Young American Men, in a time of war yet, a national emergency, take on a petty tyrant and expose the injustice of their workplace situation, list the faults of their commander and triumph against the system.

Yeah, well kinda sorta maybe.

The movie shows the scene after the trial where Barney Greenwald confronts Tom Keefer and belittle’s Keefer’s and the other officers for their actions.

The book is a little more in depth on the after trial.

The verdict in favor of Steve Maryk and the other officers is vacated as a miscarriage of justice.

And this is somewhat overlooked, Willie Keith goes back to the USS Caine.

The same ship.

The same crew.

The same Navy.

The same rules and regulations.

Queeg was gone to be sure.

Consider this.

Had all the officers let go of their personal outrage and supported Queeg the best they could have, Queeg would have been moved along by the Navy.

I understand this.

What changed.

What was different.

I think I am watching the wrong movie.

Reading the wrong book.

Perhaps I should turn instead to the classic No Time For Sergeants.

The first night in boot camp, Sergeant King comes out to explain life in the military.

He says, “Well, I’ve been in for 18 years and it ain’t like you think it is at all.
It’s a quiet, peaceful life, if you mind your own business.
It’s like there was a big lake, nice and calm.
I’m in a canoe, you’re in another, the captain’s in a canoe and the colonel.
You know what you do if you report somebody or complain about somebody …or request something?
You make waves.
I hate to pull rank on you, but for your information … you got the smallest canoe in the whole lake.”

On the whole, this is a much better outlook for the modern american workplace.

I am writing it on my office wall as you read this.

Because tomorrow we are all back in our canoes out on the lake.

The Better Angels
Of our Nature, shine brightly
that blind may see them

Where to look for hope?

A thought inspired perhaps by Mr. Lincoln.

How do we undo the damage Trump has done? Instead of writing off the 40% which still seems to be mesmerized by his racist theater, Wise has a better idea. He believes that when most people are confronted with their subconscious biases, if they are “encouraged to respond to the better angels of their nature, they will do it.

“It’s when you don’t let them believe that they have better angels; if you make it seem like, ‘You’re just a horrible, irredeemable human being,’ they will show you just how horrible and irredeemable they are. The research tells us … that most white folks don’t want to think of themselves as racist, and don’t want to be racist.” From a review by Charles Kaiser of The Man Who Sold America by Joy-Ann Reid

The phrase, Better Angels, maybe comes to us from Charles Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge, “It is curious to imagine these people of the world, busy in thought, turning their eyes towards the countless spheres that shine above us, and making them reflect the only images their minds contain…So do the shadows of our own desires stand between us and our better angels, and thus their brightness is eclipsed”  though Abraham Lincoln’s 1st Inaugural Address, I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature. “

In 1861, before his inauguration,  Lincoln showed a draft of what he intended to say to William Seward, his Secretary of State.  Seward recommended that Lincoln conclude with conciliatory words, and sketched out a few sentences for Lincoln to consider.

Seward’s rough draft, which has been preserved, contains the expression “better angel.”  Twenty years earlier, in 1841, Charles Dickens had used “our better angels” in his novel “Barnaby Rudge.” There is no evidence that Lincoln  read Dickens, but Seward did.

Lincoln read Seward’s rough draft in which Seward had scratched out the words”better angel” and substituted in their place “guardian angel of the nation.” Lincoln then turned Seward’s discarded two words into the memorable expression “better angels of our nature.” (from A Lincoln Quotation You Can Use In Writing: Charles Dickens and Abraham Lincoln by Gene Griessman, Ph.D)