Better Living through Software

Today was the funeral for a co-worker.  He was a year younger than me, with an infant son and two very sick parents.  A terrible tragedy, he was cut down by an undetected and unexpected illness with only a week or two of warning.

The pastor at the funeral service exploited the tragedy to the maximum in an attempt to harvest souls.  The pastor, speaking in Chinese with repetition by the English translator, painted a rather surreal picture.  He explained that the deceased had found religion upon realizing that he was about to die, and that the deceased had essentially bargained with God; promising to testify on God’s behalf if God would spare his life.

Completely dodging the implications of making such a bargain when God calls your bluff, the pastor then lurched on to assert that “God *could* have saved the deceased, but sometimes God kills someone as a way to make people pay attention and submit to Jesus”.  He repeatedly drew parallels between the death of the deceased and the passion of Christ, exhorting the largely Chinese (and no doubt shrewd) audience to respond to the propaganda and take the bargain.

I’m sure he thought he was doing the right thing, but the crass manipulation makes me want to puke.  And the kindest thing that can be said of the theology is that there are serious questions to be raised.  The people who respond to such arguments are not the people he wants; and the people he wants will be repulsed by such arguments.  The end does not justify the means.

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I think of the Drew Peterson case in current events, where it seems likely that this police officer killed two of his wives.  The news recently has been rife with examples of police officers doing bad things, and people wonder who they can trust.  Drew Peterson was a senior police officer with a son who is also a police officer, so it’s surreal to observe that he would probably pass a polygraph while reciting bald-faced lies.

Based on recent events, would you tell your children that police officers are murderers?  More to the point, would you tell your children that a career in law enforcement would be unethical?

In the face of authorities who are often corrupt, people need to make judgments and decide whom to trust.  Do you decide that all authority is untrustworthy, or do you refine your judgment and take a calculated risk with your revised definition of authority?  It sure would be nice if all authorities were trustworthy and such questions never arose, but it would be boring as well.  Capacity to judge is a defining human characteristic.

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This funeral adds to three other tragedies in the past month, touching people I’ve known for years (memoriam via Dare).  I knew Anita for nearly 10 years, and same for Uche, whose 3 young nieces were taken.  Marc I only followed, but never met.  Such tragedies give me a deeper sense of gratitude for the durability of good friend William Loughborough, who has emerged intact from a couple of situations in the past year.  And also reinforce my resolve to live in a way that remains at peace with my own mortality. 

When I was single, ten plus years ago, I was always “ready to die”.  But having a wife and (especially) kids changed the equation immensely.  It’s impossible to really explain how that changed things.  But now, since last December or so, I’ve put things in order and am at peace with my own mortality and whatever happens to my obligations here.  If I died tomorrow, there would be nothing to keep my anxious geist around.  Hopefully I can maintain this state until I die many years from now.

~

Coincidentally, I’ve had three major losses of data/memory in the past few months:

• First, I decided to use my backup drives to temporarily do video processing for my job, since “what are the odds that the master will crash?”.  I lost 3 years worth of e-mails and photos.
• After spending a couple of thousand dollars on hard drive recovery that was less than 50% successful, I once again “borrowed” my personal backup drives for work purposes — one at my office and one to fedex to a co-worker.  Thinking, “what are the odds that a drive would crash again within just a few months?”  The (new) data drive crashed two days ago and I’ve not yet attempted recovery.  Assume the worst.
• I type notes to myself via e-mail from my phone.  I queue notes for several weeks before sending.  Today my phone completely crashed, losing more than 2 months worth of notes that had been stored in the “drafts” folder of the phone without being sent.

Every loss of personal history is a shattering pain.  The loss of the notes from the phone is the most painful.  I might as well have not lived for the last two months, and there is no guarantee that I’ll ever be able to replicate what was stored there.  But I’ll neither bargain nor complain — what’s lost is lost.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 15th, 2007 at 11:02 pm and is filed under Life at Microsoft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.