Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Dear Potential Employer,


I am a slightly strange person in seek of employment. I would like to help the world become a marginally more hopeful place. You see, I have such love of life that I am moved to ask for your help lest it be ground to nothingness in service to some machine. Such a loss would certainly be a personal tragedy for myself, but we all have those, and I would not ask for help if I thought it was merely a personal concern. But I believe that our primary obligation as human beings is to fulfill our destiny – that is, to give our gifts to the world – for by giving our humanness to the world, the world becomes more human. And my gift is to give the gift of that knowledge itself.

Though it may be naïve, I am writing a letter that says what I actually have to give rather than doing as I should and marketing myself as an employable commodity. I might help people struggle to understand the gifts they have to give, as I have struggled to understand mine. I might show the alternative to each individual's illusion of containment and limitation. I might resuscitate imaginations. I might teach how to think of a new way to do something in a way that is just a little better for everybody. Just as now, by writing this letter, I am trying a new way to do something so that the doing of it might strengthen rather than degrade my ability to live in myself as I am. And every strong individual in America is a fulfillment of our destiny as a nation.

Yours in Excruciating Seriousness,
Ishai Buchbinder