Jennifer and The Inhuman Institution

Detroit, Michigan

Monumental hands reach out of the earth holding raw metals, jagged rocks, soft red clay, brown and black. Monumental hands are like gods manipulating the earth to mold and create what they will. The scale of the mural tells a mythological and ancient story; mankind’s use of tools to make life easier, to progress, to enchant, to impress, to move the species forward and forward and ever forward.

Driving through Michigan, I wouldn’t have guessed this state was an epicenter for an American movement. North out of Tennessee I drive through the long state of Indiana that’s an everlasting beige and green plain into Michigan and to Detroit, a memorial to a distant time.

Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry Mural at The Detroit Institute of Art surrounds and towers above to the sky. At the top, those god-like hands rise up from the deep with raw earth and rock then melt down into the panel below where in an infinite and complex world of mechanics and fire and men it is shaped into automobiles. In a small panel, like a postscript or a whisper, there is the painting of an infant curled up in a womb and curvy, bare-breasted women on either side like a small reminder that we all start there. No matter what we create or how god-like we attempt to become, we were all once babes taking form in water in the womb of a woman.

I imagine being alive when this city was bustling or long before that during the Industrial Revolution. When dirt was in the process of no longer being home. The sky no longer residence of the great creator. The ocean no longer an edge of a mystery. The water and dirt and sky instead were becoming commodities. We humans no longer woven into the earth but consumers and manufacturers of it. It must have felt like a revolution. Like the brink of something great.

The Cathedral of Finance at 500 Griswold Street is a memorial to a golden era of American manufacturing, built during a time when artists where flown here from New York City and commissioned to do great works of art and bankers set-up shops and Detroit was bustling and the air spoke to all that something is happening. The ceiling of The Cathedral of Finance is a rainbow of tiles, stained glass angels and a mural of a golden goddess rising up from the state of Michigan and spreading her light to the surrounding region. Tiles at the entrance read Founded on principals of faith and understanding this building is erected for the purposes of maintaining and continuing the ideals of the financial service… I try to think of the last time I’ve seen an institution use words like faith or principals and I cannot.

This hall was once bustling. But now it’s empty aside from two receptionists with eyes eyes glued to phones that echo in the empty hall like the ghost of a forgotten past. I think of my co-worker, Jennifer, and a trip we took last year to the corporate office. Jennifer has a yellow cat and a daughter with curly hair and she talks a lot and giggles when she’s drunk from two cucumber cocktails. I’ve seen Jennifer cry a handful of times. I think Jennifer may be too sensitive for the corporate life.

The corporate life is a strange and unnatural beast, an inhuman institution. It’s something created by humans to serve humans but somehow we’ve ended up serving it. I myself am a slave to car payments and five hour wait times and online forms I must complete to get my refund. I’m a slave to the Instagram feed that keeps me scrolling ‘til 3 in the morning. The check the box to prove I am not a robot or press all the squares containing palm trees. The two or three factor authentication, check your texts and check your emails to provide the five digit code. The debit card number and drivers license number and license plate number and social security number and routing number and the fifty passwords that all need special case and lower case and capital case and more numbers. In this inhuman institution, I am these numbers and I am treated inhumanly. No wonder my friends are sad and anxious and depressed. We’re being shoved into an inhuman institution that only fits a small part of us. But what about all the rest? Working 60 hour weeks and career goals and routine reminders of all the things Jennifer needs to improve on. I tell Jennifer I think she should work at a place that doesn’t make her cry. I tell her she should be somewhere she’s happy.

Workers without names, only numbers. Workers with only bodies, not minds. I have witnessed people create and be proud of what they’ve made. A chef in a smokey kitchen. A photographer capturing fleeting moments. A craftsman sewing leather shoes, a trade he learned from his father and his father from his. A carpenter smoothing wood. A woman hunched over a half-woven basket. Mankind, creating that which was passed down from older generations. Mankind, a reflection of a creator who also creates. Mankind, rooted into what he makes. But what happens when we do not believe in what we create? When what we are creating is a strange and unnatural beast, an inhuman institution? Something created by humans to serve humans but somehow we’ve ended up serving it? When humanity is stripped out of vocation and vocation is but a reflection of an inhuman institution, what happens to humanity then?

This inhuman institution wants us to pledge our allegiance. But we are much bigger than it. I know I am as big as the sky and as big as the water and as big as the mountain and I felt like a strange, half-self, traitor there where we gathered to discuss our corporate vision, where we got paid to care, where if you can’t do politics, you left crying. Jennifer, I’m bigger than this inhuman institution. And you’re bigger than it too. I know it. Don’t you?