In the
petrochemical industry we spend a lot of time in safety meetings because there
is danger everywhere in what we do and where we work. Nothing is user friendly,
and it’s all designed to hurt you very badly, or kill you. As a long project moves
on, most of us tune out at the daily mass safety meetings because the same message is
delivered every day, and it gets very tedious when there is no new information.
It often feels like a beating just to be in the meetings.
Tonight’s meeting
was a little different. A fine young man we’ve worked the entire job with took to
the podium, and it was immediately apparent he is not very comfortable as a
public speaker. He read the words off a prepared document, making eye contact
when he could. He told us about himself, his upbringing in a home where both
parents regularly abused alcohol and drugs, and spent little time parenting. Then
the inevitable divorce, how he and his sister had to raise and take care of themselves,
and how cirrhosis killed his father three years ago at a relatively young age.
He didn’t tell
the story to evoke sympathy, he just wanted to get our attention. At the end of
a long project like ours, one that is going to end a week after it should have,
there is an unspoken pressure to get things done quickly, and get the unit
turned over to operations. Tempers get short, voices get loud, and the different
crafts start pointing fingers and laying blame on each other as to why the work
isn’t getting done. This young man’s message was to slow down, even under the
pressure of meeting a deadline, and making sure we are all doing a quality job,
safely.
He used some
recent words from Lady Gaga: “In times of chaos and crisis, what we all tend to
do is start pointing fingers at where we think the bad guys are, where the evil
is. Everybody has different opinions about that. Please do not forget that
hatred or evil, whatever you want to call it, it’s intelligent. It’s smart and
it’s invisible. It doesn’t have a color, it doesn’t have a race, it doesn’t
have a religion, and it has no politics. It’s an invisible snake. “While evil is planning to make its attack,
it is thinking to itself, ‘I am going to divide my enemy into smaller, less
strong groups and then I’m going to make them hate each other, so that it’s
easier to take them down.’ And as we’re all yelling at each other trying to
figure out which group it is, evil is winning all around us.”
The young man closed
his remarks with this: We have to get rid of these labels, these different
factions; rich and poor; black and white; straight and gay; Christian, Muslim, and
Jew; none of this should matter. Rather, we should all be unified in the one
thing that is common to us all: our humanity. The one thing we should all appreciate
in one another is kindness. This has to come before all things.
He definitely had
my attention.
