Human Repurposing

I dig the cotton out of the top of the Tylenol container and instinctively unravel it into a fluffy ribbon. Something about the soft, white cuddliness always makes me loath to throw it away, but my headache demands I move on to the more pertinent contents of the bottle.

And maybe it’s the headache or the clouds making me contemplative on a winter’s day, but it occurs to me how we as humans hold on to THINGS. On a sentimental level, we keep artifacts from our childhoods and milestones until they are unrecognizable and musty, and there is a vigorous industry for storage containers that relies upon that penchant.

In a practical vein, we keep things that seem to still hold utility. That old television might be used in a spare bedroom; those torn jeans might still be salvageable once patched- just put them on the pile over there, I’ll get to them.

Even items that clearly cannot be saved, we attempt to recycle. It has become a moral imperative to gather glass, cans, and paper from one’s home and take them to the recycling center. And the more entrepreneurial of us have even been heralded as socially conscious innovators for creating bricks from plastic, sustainable new materials out of old, disposable ones.

Expensive stores, restaurants, bars, and modern buildings boast “repurposed” furniture that is at once chic and environmentally responsible. To a growing degree: we know how to handle our garbage.

Unless that trash is of the human variety, in which case, we re-open the landfill and fire up the furnace.

As we grow more and more principled about our care for THINGS, we seem to lose more and more patience with PEOPLE. When someone reveals a flaw…a hole in their moral fabric, a weakness in their foundation, a shabby, worn-out appearance… we dispose of them. In the press, in the workplace, in the public eye.

And we seem to find ourselves justified. As if utterly destroying the person carrying the faults we despise somehow eradicates the faults themselves. Or even more subconsciously, as if perhaps no one will see OUR sins if attention is focused on THEIRS.

In our intimacies, we have made it popular to “get rid of negativity” by getting rid of people, and the new dating atrocity, “ghosting,” has been met with amusement, and, at times, applause.

Would we not be better served to instead…repurpose humans?

For example, suppose it is revealed that you and your best friend are not able to work through some fundamental differences. Rather than cutting each other off, and possibly even becoming enemies, can we not decide that we can remain acquaintances? Why is it an all or nothing bargain?

Simply excising even a disastrous relationship from your life does not erase the memories, the lessons, the experience that you gained- yes, gained- from your time with that person. YOU decide whether you will let it be a crippling trauma or a valuable trial through which you grew wiser and stronger.

Politicians, celebrities, public people of every stripe are put under a microscope, often for someone else’s selfish purposes, until a scandal is found, and now, there is no redemption. No matter how long ago the transgressions occurred, the perpetrators must be ‘taken down,’ their lives and careers destroyed, and apologies must be issued, often to a public who has no right to grant forgiveness for an evil moment that had nothing to do with them. Does it somehow make us feel better to make ‘famous’ people feel worse? Is our secret desire for parity with those who seem ‘above’ us assuaged by forcing them beneath us?

We route out the wrong and the base and the foolish in even our historical figures and demand that they not be revered or respected when their ‘sins’ come to light.

But if one’s good does not cancel out one’s bad, then the inverse is also true.

There are few people who are beyond repair. What if, instead of instantly relegating people to the garbage dump, we instead took a breath and made an effort to see if they could not in fact be…repurposed?

Some of the most caring activists, insightful authors, touching artists, effective leaders, and vocal thinkers are people who have fallen and risen again to help others, to tell their stories, to right wrongs that they only could address because of the depths they themselves had plumbed. Our predecessors, in all areas, were flawed. Just as we all are. Just as we always will be.

Even the old Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Christmas special understood redemption and repurposing, when the Abominable Snowman was reformed, and he placed the star atop the elves’ tree.

“Looky what he can do!”

So, maybe for today, look past the roar and the bluster in an infuriating public figure. Put into perspective the impact of an imagined horror in a far-off Pole. Find the monster in your story and ask: What star can he lift for you?

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