I live, I breathe, and I love. I look at the sky at night and see the endless stars. I open the window, and smell the cinnamon air after the sun has warmed the earth in spring. I feel my body rebound, and move with ease. I taste coffee in the morning. I eat fresh fruit. My sweet dog greets me when I wake, and has smiling eyes for the world around her. These are experiences of living.
Today I woke realizing, that the community I have often found myself “enduring” is absurd. I don’t exactly know how I got here. Isn’t that often the case? But I did. I walked through a door, sat at a table, had a fateful encounter. It began as simple as that. And then for too many years to follow, I have been running, dodging, and fighting a world that seems absurd by design. And today, I am going to walk away.
Last night I watched a film that put things into perspective for me. It was called The Well-digger’s Daughter, (a 2011 French film). What I remember after watching it was that life can be simple and beautiful. The rich and poor can get along and realize their similarities. Communities can have simple rules of ethics and honor that provide good boundaries to contain our natural behavior and insures all individuals will thrive.
These simple ideas fly in contrast to what I have been observing and experiencing. The leaders in my larger community believe in little. Their words are hollow no matter how eloquent. They have no ethics, other than to serve those more powerful than themselves, no matter how unethical the task may be. We call it politics. But it is just a polite word to say we except the bad behavior and feel helpless to do anything about it.
Why do we have whistleblowers in our communities? Why does congress need to create laws to direct their complaints into channels where they will not be heard? Whistleblowers are an anomaly of an unhealthy community; a community that is functioning on the ethics of corruption and exploitation. If our community was healthy, and serving everyone as it should, there would be no need for whistleblowers, or organizations to deal with their growing number. We speak about them as truth tellers, yet the press and the leaders of the community, like all good kingdoms, treat their telling as treasonous. They are jailed, their ability to earn a living is disrupted, their friends and family are intimidated, harmed, and threatened. On some level we all know, after observing what happens to a whistleblower that we are supposed to keep our mouths shut when observing the wrongs in our community, especially if they are carried out by those who sit at the right hand of the King, or those who protect his interests. But this whole business, of being a whistleblower or not being one, is just another symptom. In a healthy community, where we understand a few simple rules of behavior and all agree to them, there is no need to expose corruption or exploitation, because there is no room for it to exist.
So let’s retreat for a moment into another place and time in order to see our community more clearly.
In the “Well-digger’s Daughter”, a man who works with his hands, digging and repairing wells, is a father raising 6 daughters on his own. It is during the early part of the 20th century. There is a war going on. He calls himself not so good, but honest. One of his older daughters is the joy of his life. She is beautiful, brilliant, and has a strong natural desire to help the others in her family and it gives her pleasure to do so. But in a simple moment, when taking her father’s lunch to him, she has to cross a stream. By chance, a wealthy man’s son is playing in the stream and sees her. He likes her beauty and it amuses him to offer to carry her across the stream, and she agrees. It is a fateful moment, because that simple gesture sets into motion their emotional connection. In a few weeks she becomes pregnant. But by this time, the boy has returned to fight in the war. At the same time, the daughter has no sense that he would want to be with her, or marry her, even if he was not absent. So she tells her father, about her plight.
This is a difficult community issue, as to be pregnant out of wedlock was seen as dishonorable. The father takes his daughter to the parents of the boy, and explains to them what has happened. He hopes that they will want to help right the dishonor. But the parents prefer to ignore the situation, and the possible blight on their otherwise beautiful son. The Well Digger and his daughter leave, knowing that they must face this dishonor on their own. The father decides the solution is to disown the daughter, and send her from the community, into a new community, where she can start life again. It is harsh, but it is accepted.
But life intervenes. The boy is thought to be killed in war. The girl gives birth to a son. The Well Digger has longed for a male heir, and so goes to the daughter and brings her home. The grieving parents of the dead boy learn of their grandson, and seek a relationship with him in order to soothe their pain of loss. This bonds the two classes, the wealthy parents of the boy and the working-class Well-digger. In this bonding, they realize their differences are few. The Well-diggers family is infused with simple rules that govern their behavior, making it possible to live and thrive, and they have much love for each other. The wealthy couple began to be part of their family.
A few weeks later, the boy returns from war. The news that he had died was in error.
In the last scene, the wealthy family drives to the well-digger’s home. The wealthy father apologizes to the well-digger for putting he and his family into a state of dishonor in the community. He asks the well-digger if he will accept his son’s offer of marriage to his daughter? The well-digger responds that he is moved by this action to right a wrong, and to make “the furniture gleam” and “brightness return to all”. He accepts. But the daughter and the boy are silent. And so the daughter finally speaks, and says, that she does not want to marry if it is only a matter of returning honor to the family; that the marriage must be based on love. The boy is silent, but takes her out to “get some air”. He teases her, saying that of course he is unhappy about the marriage. But then laughs and says, he loves her more than she knows. The families are united. The grandson has his proper name. The legacy of the two families continues.
Although this film chose an outdated idea of birth out of wedlock to base its premise, it allows us to see the rules of honor and ethics within a small community and 2 family units within it. We could glimpse these rules in operation and see how they provided the framework for human behavior to thrive. The idea of honor was exchanged between the families, as a ticket for stability within the community. There were multiple violations of honor because of human frailty, but the ethics in the community helped all violators see the impact of their bad acts and to do something to right the wrong. The agreed upon ethics ensured the harmony of the community and the lives of individuals within it.
In my community we have whistleblowers who feel compelled to risk their safety and well being, and that of their families, to let others know that there is corruption within the highest ranks of leadership. I don’t think we understand how much of an anomaly this is. There are no internal ethics here that cause a powerful man to feel uncomfortable for causing dishonor in another man’s life. We have even lost any expectation of this occurring. Instead we expect the corruption, even if we greet it with distain. We agree to look the other way when we observe exploitation, even if we are part of it, and are willing to look the other way if it means we get to sit at the table of kings. We don’t do this merely for personal gain, but because we sense that this is what our community values. Our community resides on a framework of anti-ethics. And until we recognize this, walk away from it, and build something else, where all individuals are respected and graced with honor, we will only be the indentured subjects of the one-eyed man, in the blind kingdom of cruelty and exploitation.
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