Don't prosecute me. I was only following orders
It is a crushing experience to have to earn your “bread”. To suffer and swelter in a take away shop knowing that your life is absent, deserting itself and leaving it to fight the hordes that come in, day in and day out, by itself, unsure and frightfully angry.
I try to convince myself that I am, in fact, a student. I am enrolled at university and this must count for something, right? Being a student means something, a student is a character in a Russian novel, a man awaiting his destiny, suffering for his right to it. I would like to think that that character is me as I take another order, as I throw another corpse on the grill.
However, I cannot convince myself. This is how I earn my money. By frying things, non-specific things that have names attached that might or might not be true accounts of what they actually are. I would not know for I no longer eat the food where I work. I just doll it out to the people who come in and ask for it in their own manner and custom.
Some order softly, some loud. Some order with a “please” tacked on the end, others imply it and others with the thought that payment is enough. Some know what to order and then others don’t and they stare at the menu with a look on their face that bemuses me. People who think about the nature of god a great deal often have the look on their face, like they taste something sour or something that has turned. This look usually precedes a statement of great profundity and it is always a disappointment when it produces little more than “a burger with fries, thanks”.
I again try to convince myself that my life is elsewhere, eloping with a beautiful bride on a yacht bound for Tahiti. These ruminations invariably distract me from my post and cause me to dip my fingers, along with the fries, into frying oil. I’m glad for the pain because it is better than the dull agony that comes with doing very little, very often, for so little money.
I don’t know what any of this has to do with what I initially started thinking about, but work related depression is a hard thing to escape unless you actually escape the cause of said depression. A hard thing to do if you want to study and you’re not lucky enough to have an intravenous trust fund.
What I actually wanted to talk about was the terrible obesity I have to witness on a day to day basis. Now I don’t actually have anything against obesity as such, but I am concerned about it from a medical point of view. I have an interest in the future of our fine nation and it looks like that it’s going to require a quadruple by-pass in no more than a few years.
I also cannot help but think that I, meek little me, am responsible in an intimate way.
I serve the food that is making us fat.
I sell the food that is making us fat.
I provide misinformation about the food that is making us fat.
More than all this, I suffer terribly, for the personal reasons I related above, while selling the food that is making us fat.
The guilt is unbearable, both for the damage I am doing to others and the damage I do to myself. The question plagues me – do I have a moral obligation to the customers that are, admittedly, operating within a free market, free fat economy? Should I refuse them service when they refuse to stop eating slabs of bread stuffed with fried chicken and mayonnaise.
I am acquainted with customers that have been known to come to our shop two to three times a day with a terrifying regularity. Usually they hail from a low socio-economic bracket, working jobs as dull as mine, and they do not possess the time nor the resources to eat a healthier and more time consuming diet.
I just hate it when they appear to enjoying it, even when they seem to be on the verge of passing out or exploding when they leave the shop.
After the Nazi cloud of atrocity had been repelled the excuse the world heard so often was – “but I was only following orders”. It became the last bunker, a German Alamo, which could not be breached. To confront it would be for every nation to study its own history and carry out its own moral reckoning. In the name of world stability and in the presence of a growing shadow cast by the looming clouds of the cold war, that last bunker was left intact.
Did the German people have an obligation to put aside self interest to stop what had become an immanent threat to a whole race, and conceivable the world. Many would say that the obligation was there and that a whole nation turned its back on it.
It might seem irresponsible to liken my case with that of the German people, but the severity of the analogy is used to outline the severity of Australia’s and America’s current situation. The biggest killer in Australia at the moment is heart disease and I am part of the industry that directly and inescapably causes it. I feel that I also have an obligation, a moral duty, which is bigger than my need to support myself. What I make at this job isn’t worth it.
I’m killing people. The people I work for are killing people, slowly and with a particular humiliation.
I am a student. I respect truth. Maybe I should stop working for the wrong side of the fence.
Don’t prosecute me, I was just following orders. But not for much longer.