"Do Whatever You Have To Do To Sell Yourself"

This is the lesson that I learned during my orientation at the unemployment career center.  We tend to act so smug because we believe we have moved beyond the archaic traditions of dowries and servitude.  "Sell yourself" is an expression to denote prostitution, which our culture demeans.  When it comes to jobs/careers though, it is perfectly "normal."  It appeared that no one even noticed how dehumanizing this was in the room of seven people who were learning to say "I'm in career transition" instead of "I'm unemployed."

Most of the one-hour orientation was a pep talk for the group not to feel so depressed about their lack of employment.  We were supposed to feel good that, in spite of all the stormy weather outside, we had the resolve to attend this class to help us pursue the lofty goal of getting someone to hire us!  The instructor went further to say that we were actually "working;" we were working to market ourselves.  How much time and resources are spent on finding people jobs, I wondered.  It would be so much more worthwhile if these resources were used to find people the right work for them, as whole individuals, but with the way things are, society is focused on just finding people anything that provides them an income.

Despite the overwhelming evidence of our interdependency as a species, we still hold high the values of rugged individualism.  One person, all alone, can succeed and amass great power and wealth through sheer determination and competency.  It is very shortsighted of us to see life this way.  Our society is constantly disintegrating because of this illusion, and the result is a renewal of the stream of suffering.  We cannot wall ourselves off from sorrow without hurting ourselves.  To see this interdependency is to awaken to a sense of responsibility.  If your hand is injured, it's best to soothe and repair it.  If you are too late in responding to its injuries, you will have to cut it off, but then you have lost something special.  The hand does not have to "sell itself" to us for us to nourish it.  We instinctively understand its importance.  Will the time come when we understand the importance of each one of us, not as an abstract concept, but in our guts?  Then, people won't have to treat themselves and others as commodities.