Turkeys and Network Printers

There was a time when the water cooler used to be the place where co-workers met to discuss the news of the day. These days, at least at my place of work, we meet instead by a pool of network printers. This was where I ran into a couple of colleagues, let’s call them Janice and Khalid, the other day. As soon I greeted them, I realized we three seemed like a setup line for a joke: Janice is Jewish, Khalid a Jordanian Muslim, and me a Unitarian Universalist with a Hindu upbringing. However, there was no humor or levity in the air. We picked up our print jobs and were about to scurry out of there like polite mice, when I saw a picture of a turkey taped to the wall--a leftover decoration from Thanksgiving. Then I heard myself saying, “Happy holidays! Hope you’ll have a restful time, and who knows, we may even get peace on earth one of these days.”

“We’ll never have peace on earth,” said Janice.

“She’s right,” Khalid agreed. “Too many things have happened for people to forget.”

“Can I quickly share a story that my older sister used to tell me when I was a child?” I said. “It goes like this. Once a wise man and his disciples were crossing a stream. The wise man spotted a scorpion in the water about to drown. He bent down, picked it up, and was going to place it on the bank when the scorpion stung him. In pain, he dropped it back in the water. But he bent down and picked it up again. And again the scorpion stung him. He dropped it again in the water and was going to bend down to pick it up a third time, when one of his disciples screamed at him. ‘You’re a fool, not a wise man,” he said. “Why would you try to save that scorpion’s life after it bit you twice?’ But the wise man reached for the scorpion anyway and placed it on the safe, dry ground. The scorpion seemed to have no venom left in it to strike again. The wise man smiled and said, ‘if the scorpion is so stubborn in its desire to do harm, why can’t I be equally stubborn in my desire to do good?’”

I looked at my colleagues. “Don’t you think one way we can bring about peace on earth is to be stubborn about being ourselves no matter what the other person does?”

Janice laughed in my face. “I don’t think you really mean what you’re saying. Things like that sound good in stories, but in real life if someone hurts you or one of your family members, you will be screaming for revenge.”

“She’s right again,” said Khalid. “But you’d make a good writer for Hallmark or one of those chicken soup books.”

Great! A Muslim and a Jew, who probably didn’t see eye to eye on too many topics, were both agreeing on one thing: that I was a fool.

I wanted to say that I knew what I was talking about, that I have had my belief system tested by events like the murder of a family member.

Then the picture of the turkey caught my eye again. “I’d like to believe that human beings are eagles that think they are turkeys,” I said. “We can fly to the moutaintop if we realize who we are.”

“It’s the other way round,” said Janice. “All human beings are turkeys. Some of the turkeys, like you, have fantasies of flying, but that doesn’t make us eagles. I for one would like to be practical and not attempt the impossible.”

I wondered how practical it was to be part of an endless cycle of revenge. Wouldn’t it make more sense to end the cycle in the first place with a refusal to return hate for hate?

“Even if we are turkeys,” I said, “we may still reach the mountaintop by flying a little bit at a time, from one plateau to another.”

I must have sounded tired and hopeless. “Look at the bright side,” said Janice. “ I can see why your wife married you. Some of us women are attracted to dreamers and poets, like the guy in the movie Dr. Zhivago.”

Khalid placed a hand on my shoulder. “Keep dreaming, though. Even if your dreams don’t come true, at least they’ll make a movie about you.”

We left the area with smiles on our faces. World peace was nowhere in sight, but there was a moment of peace in three hearts in a small corner of the world filled with Hewlett Packard printers.

(Dec 2002)