We don’t!
Dear friends,
I have this sweet memory: Bill and I were sitting in his orange Corolla with the black and white houndstooth vinyl top (It was as hideous or cool—you decide—as it sounds). He looked at me with the earnest blue eyes I was just beginning to love and said, “Kitti, I just want to be real.”
Little did he know in 1978 what “real” might require of him. But, as earnestly as he said it, he pursued it. He was just himself. No need to prove anything. No need to impress. No need to pretend.
In the three years he’s been gone, I wonder if, of all the developments in our world, nothing would befuddle this authentic human more than AI. Bill was an early adopter, so he wasn’t categorically opposed to AI as if the tool itself was evil. But I can imagine him shaking his head over this recent article from Science magazine about chatbots whose answers to users’ questions “were nearly 50% more sycophantic than humans,’ even when users engaged in unethical, illegal, or harmful behaviors.”
The need for a sycophantic friend to prop up his ego and his choices, especially the unwise, harmful ones, would be so foreign to him. He sought out the opposite: friends who would tell him the unvarnished truth.
It might even strike him, as it does me now, that in every empire, both actual and legendary, since the beginning of time, evil has needed sycophants to thrive, but goodness has not. (Solzhenitsyn’s chilling story in The Gulag Archipelago about an 11-minute applause for Stalin comes to mind.)
What on earth does this have to do with Refuge Coffee? Everything. Before we first started our coffee business, I lazily and ignorantly assumed that our refugee neighbors needed handouts more than they needed hard work.
Once we began to hire, train, and pay refugees to run our coffee business, first as baristas and later as managers, we realized they were not interested in climbing a low learning curve. “Participation” pay was undignifying and insulting. They wanted to do work they could be proud of, they wanted to learn standards that would make them employable. They wanted accountability, not fawning. They did not want to be “token” employees; they wanted to be useful.
The struggle our refugee and immigrant employees experience is not a badge,an excuse, or even a cry for help. It’s a noble story they work to put in their rearview mirrors as quickly as possible.
We simply provide jobs that give them a head start in the process of moving ahead. supporting this intentional accountability, you give us the additional push forward we need. This is real. Real healing.
Your (real) friend,
Kitti
