CW 48

To no one in particular,

A reminder to serve.

The door to the bathroom is slightly open. I spy from my swing my eldest one sitting on the potty reading a comic book and smiling and chatting to herself and having a good time. I remember to take this moment in. This is what's real. This is what's good. When I die, I want to see the smiles of my little ones and my wife that are etched in my memory. I want to remember the good things, the things that brought me joy, that energized me, that made me want to be kind.

I write this because for a few weeks now I've been nursing grudges. I've been walking around angry at many of the people I believed were allies. They aren't and I have every right to be angry at the treacherous bastards and I have every right to be angry at those who support them. I've been cultivating anger and I've been short with the people I love, in particular my beautiful child who smiles and giggles and creates and shows kindness. In my anger I am deluded. The actual source of my anger is me. The actual reason I am angry is because I am failing to live up to my values.

Corp. is a slush fund. Everyone know it. But it's hard to overestimate just how badly managed Corp. is. You would think that the personalities that run Corp. at the board and executive level would hire people to manage it in such a way as to ensure enough profits for them to plunder. Instead it seems as if Corp. looks only for the right people to tank it. You wouldn't know it by looking at Corp.: fancy buildings, smooth-talking managers, snazzy advertisements on holoreceptors and mobile terminals, a lineup of consumer and industrial goods, and plenty of funding for the arts. Beneath the glitz, management is at best incompetent and at worst criminally irresponsible. Some run their units as fiefdoms, vassals who answer only to the noble lord who inherited her title only by the randomness of her birth. Others are spinless hacks. They run their units as mouthpieces of power. They are incapable of dissenting, incapable of disagreeing, incapable of expressing to their subordinates that the orders are bullshit but that those are the orders. 

For most, this is a part of life on this planet. The culture is such that hierarchy matters more than performance. Rocking the boat meant disaster in the early days of settlement. Today, that culture is abused to maintain power structures. Running down the ladder, not rocking the boat has also meant keeping a job, on a planet, as I've explained before, resources are many but so poorly distributed. But keeping that job also means suffering countless acts of disrespect. It also means accepting that one will over the course of a career waste many, many hours for the sake of placating the egos of a superior. 

For others, especially those from off-planet, this can be hard to accept. It's generally acknowledged that our tours will only last so long. But I'm actually reconsidering my entire plan. Is this worth my time, is this worth my effort, is this worth my life? Is worth the delusion of anger? Is it worth trading moments of joy and happiness and sharing moments of kindness with my children for the possibility of accumulating plaudits? Are my ambitions, such as I have conceived them, worth possibly missing out on what at the end of all eternity will matter to me most: that image of my child smiling, giggling, reading, singing, and building a world as expansive as her joy. The more I think about it, the more I am coming to the realization that the game is not worth the candle. 

But since I am here for a little while longer, it's important that I make the most of it. 

At the end of my shift, a colleague of mine told me the story of our two young apprentices. They come from early settler communities which were traditionally marginalized. That marginalization continued on the interstellar transporters that brought them here and made it's way into society on planet. Anyway, the point being that up until they'd been brought to us for training thanks thanks to a planet-wide search for talent, their communities had been subsisting on refuse dumped from posh neighborhoods into the outer rings as well as on field mice (which hitched a ride on the first interstellar cargoes and transporters).

My heart broke. This should have never happened. This system has the resources to sustain everyone present in it and all the settlers to come. Instead we've managed to reproduce the same inequities that forced us to seek the stars in the first place. Don't get it wrong: it was never about exploration. Political and economic impetus came only because we were headed for a disaster that was sure to upend the system on Earth. Sure, a lot of planets have managed to find more equitable governance, but they've leveraged the inequalities here to make a paradise for themselves.

But here we are. 

And I remember my petty gripes with small people.

Who do I serve? Is it the young apprentices who've come to us in hopes of elevating their families out of misery? Is it my young child and her extraordinary spirit? 

When I die, it is their beautiful lives that I want to remember.