My workplace is supposed to be apolitical but it isn’t.
It is a high-tech stomping ground for presidential candidates traipsing through New Hampshire. The gleaming glass and brick building, and the marquee name of the company provide a great photo-op which allows candidates to babble about “cutting edge” technologies of the twenty-first century. It makes an interesting contrast to the other standard New Hampshire venues: the small town with the Congregationalist church in the middle of an early 19th century common, or the a crowded breakfast diner where people are more interested in finishing their pancakes than investing time in some presidential wannabe.
On 9/11, I arrived at my office about a half-hour after the first tower had been struck. I noticed a crowd gathering in an auditorium at the facility. It was full of people watching the events of lower Manhattan unfold on a large wide-screen television. People were sitting in chairs, stunned, watching the atrocity unfold in hushed tones, except for one lunatic who was thinking out-loud about the next shoe to drop.
I walked out after seeing the first tower fall. I was physically ill and was seething with rage. Most of the people in the auditorium were Americans. Non-Americans, if they stopped by at all, quickly disappeared to their cubicles or to quiet groups congregating around the various coffee stations. I think they didn’t know how to react to this situation. They were clearly not emotionally invested in the events of the day and seemed to want to distance themselves from their American co-workers. I also sense that they felt they were intruding on a family crisis, and weren’t quite sure how we were going to react.
At least sixty or seventy percent of my co-workers are Asian, about evenly split between Chinese and Indians. In general I find that the Chinese are much more reticent to talk about politics. I remember one time I was having a loud discussion with a friend of mine who is of Italian American descent. In other words smart, verbal, and very opinionated. A young Chinese colleague stopped by to ask some technical question and we tried to engage him on some political hot-button topic of the day regarding international relations with China. The poor guy almost went catatonic with fright and sounded like an oriental version of Sergeant “I know nothing!” Shultz. He went bug-eyed and started rapidly spouting platitudes of how all he wanted was peace and how he had no opinion on such matters. This seems to be a common reaction. A legacy of the stories they heard from their parents about the days of the "Cultural Revolution".
Indians are much more diverse and outspoken. They happily engage in political discourse and seem to thrive on it. Their comfort level is grounded on obvious reasons: the commonality of the English language and the shared experience of achieving independence from the British Commonwealth. There is a deep respect that exists between our two cultures that is one of the few positive developments of this first decade of the new millennium.
While there are obvious political tension points that fall along cultural lines, it is the generational differences between Americans that are more aggravating. The fact that this is an engineering environment doesn’t help the situation.
One would think that engineers, being hyper-rational by nature, would engage in constructive conversation. The opposite is true. Engineers are inherently detail oriented, cautious, and afraid of jumping the gun on a decision. These are wonderful traits when you are tasked with building the next jumbo-jet airplane or some new medical device that performs laser surgery on your retina. It is a lousy trait to bring to the table when debating the future of Western civilization. Virtually very conversation about foreign policy with an engineer becomes mired in warnings about all the things that could go wrong. Indecision rules the day.
Being very bright people you might also wonder how come a knowledge of history wouldn't mitigate these occupational instincts. That they would see that it is unrealistic to approach geo-politics with the same expectations of certainty as you would when designing a system of software. But that’s precisely the rub. These very well educated people barely know any history at all. I get the feeling that Generation X’ers I work with get most of their facts from “The John Stewart Show”. They pepper their political opinions with ad-hominids or specious wisecracks laced with cheap irony.
Even living through "interesting" history hasn't made an impact. The lessons of 9/11 only lasted a few months, and then it was business as usual.