Pack that sheet (part 1)

This Monday was Day One of soul-crushing manual labor. One thing that supposedly makes the Ateneo special is the endless barrage of required social outreach activities. Whether it's a good or bad thing is a matter of personal taste, but personal tastes doesn't really matter here because it's required anyway. Furthermore, this time, the Junior Engagement Program (lovingly nicknamed JEEP) is sneakily disguised as a component of Philosophy of the Human Person, which effectively makes it an academic requirement, even though it is handled by the same goddamn office that handles the monstrosity that is NSTP-PLUS. Wow, that sure fooled me.

Sarcasm aside, this post is not about me ranting about another school requirement, or the fact that I have to go out of my comfort zone and work an entire twelve hours for no pay at all, boohoo. This is not even about me criticizing the goddamn Office for Social Concern and Involvement for their objectives or methods in facilitating their outreach programs. Although the experience of my first JEEP activity already shows a lot of problematic areas the program seems to have overlooked, it's important to be discerning enough to have one's own basis for what does or does not constitute a meaningful experience of a social outreach. True, OSCI is composed of some of the most annoying people in the entire Ateneo, but for activities like JEEP and NSTP where real learning can be done no other way but at the individual person's own pace (and I can't emphasize this enough), personal experience should come before the structures and requirements set by other people.

For this reason, fuck you OSCI and your goddamn processing sessions and the annoying people who facilitate them! Now I can set aside all expectations, presumptions, and even the fact that JEEP is a very inconvenient school requirement, and simply proceed to embrace the opportunity to experience a different reality from that which I know. Whether this will contribute to my eventual formation into a goddamn social activist or something is beyond me. I do not know what I will get from the experience, but I believe that by wholeheartedly accepting my fate for these three Mondays, it will be impossible to come out without learning anything.

Having said all these, my area of assignment is Noah's Paper Mills, Inc., a paper-producing company in Marikina. By itself, my work (wrapping reams of bond paper into pretty little packages) is very easy, but the long hours combined with ugly working conditions make the work monotonous, boring, and kind of soul-crushing. As if packing piles and piles of paper for hours wasn't mind-blowingly mundane enough, the venue is a sad-looking warehouse which gets quite hot inside on account of no electric fans, because of all the goddamn paper. Although a delightful little experience of life outside the supposedly typical Atenean comfort zone, I do have some concerns.

My biggest concern is that even if my job is good because it doesn't put me in any socially awkward situations, that's only because it doesn't put me in ANY social situation at all! While I'm half-glad because quite frankly I hate people in general, how do I learn about others if there aren't any others to talk to? Of course, this leads to my first real, experience-based comment about being a typical laborer: it is alienating and dehumanizing. It is alienating in the sense that my output is totally separable from -- and even more important than -- myself, and dehumanizing in the fact that my work requires no real thinking, no reflection, not even interaction with co-workers, but only the physical ability to wrap paper as a machine would do (isn't it ironic that the philosophy behind JEEP is supposed to be life-enriching?). And I've only worked four hours so far; compare that to the experience of the regular workers who work whole days.

What I'd really like to say here is that if Philosophy 101 in the Ateneo led me to define my being human in terms of the continual expression of the immaterial soul through the physical body, what can we say about the alienated laborer? Shall I conclude that the worker, the backbone of civilized society, lives a non-human life? For this reason I am slightly troubled by the Ateneo's unending insistence on requiring social outreach activities, because by immersing himself in the life of the less fortunate, the Atenean automatically assumes a superior position, even though surely not everyone in the labor force is there because they are miserable or unhappy. I am troubled further by the implications of what I guess I should call a "guinea pig" kind of treatment of the less fortunate, reducing them further by treating them as the subjects of some sort of philosophical experiment, where the philosopher, being able to conceive of higher meanings, assumes a superior position as well.

Of course, I may be wrong, and I am at least aware of the good intentions behind OSCI's mind-boggling activities, but nonetheless I am led to another concern which I'd like to leave this blog entry, regarding philosophy: is philosophizing an activity that only the more fortunate sector of society can afford? I am aware that the great philosophers like Socrates necessarily lived in poverty, so did we lose something along the way? Of course, these are questions that have been plaguing me long before I started JEEP, and there are a lot more that I cannot seem to articulate at the moment, but who knows what else I might learn along the way by working at Noah's goddamn Paper Mills? I hope that I continue to be totally accepting of this unique experience as the hours get longer and my patience thinner.