REFER TO GREY: Contemplations by Robert Greigos © 2007-2024

Three couples seated at a large table in the middle of the room laugh hysterically while a disinterested young woman sits forlornly on a red stool against a green wall behind the cash resister near the door to the kitchen. In that doorway, a young man leans on a broom, good-naturedly trying to attract her attention. Again, she is disinterested. Instead, she stares beyond the three couples out into the night through plate glass windows across the front of the room, waiting for evening to end and her "real life" to resume.

It is a rarity these days when employment provides the kind of engaging involvement that allows workers to "become" their jobs, convinced that by doing their jobs they are fulfilling a vital and meaningful role in their community. Rather, these days workers are hired and fired with little more compassion for their individual humanity than that offered to any other store fixture, factory machine, or office supply purchased, made use of, and then disposed of. No wonder "real life" for so many exists at home pursuing dreams that offer a brand of meaning and involvement totally missing from what today's markets offer as employment.

While free markets offer increased efficiencies over highly regulated markets, free markets are nearly totally without wisdom or foresight into the consequences they render for the environment of our planet or the psychological and physical health of the workers and consumers that power them. No one will ever be satisfied putting their fate into the hands of others. Only a participatory form of government and/or occupation whose purpose is to seek, understand, and utilize the wisdom of foresight and consequence will ever come close to fully engaging each and every citizen to their fullest potential.

How very sad it is that so few people these days know of or understand the experience of full participation in the institutions that effect the consequences of their lives. Instead, what we have are disengaged people dreaming and working toward increasingly disparate unfinished dreams.