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--- Ellen Vanrenen <ellen -dot- vanrenen -at- clear-technology -dot- com> wrote:
> Tom's post has distressed me to the point of tears. I am already very
> distressed at the thought of what might happen to those young people who may
> be asked to go into those caves. This whole situation is miserable, just
> miserable, stemming from those unthinkable acts of September 11.
Me, too, Ellen. It distresses me, too. It has distressed me so much that I've
had to seek professional help, and I find I'm having to deal with issues that
have been buried for 30 years.
The question was ethics in our profession and where each of us draws the line.
Frankly, it also distresses me that many good technical writers would refuse to
work on defense-related projects. Yet I know that it's not just writers who
feel that such work falls on the other side of an ethical line that they draw
for themselves.
Someone--I'm not singling you our here, Ellen--will say that they won't work on
a specific kind of weapons project or for the gun industry. I suppose the
reason is that they are opposed to violence. Yet the safety we enjoy is often
protected by people who are willing to respond to violence with violence when
necessary. I find it interesting that people can enjoy the benefits of having
others protect them while being able to absolve themselves of all
responsibility for violence themselves.
It's nice to live in a world where you can pay someone else to protect you. It
is also useful to keep in mind that those who do the protecting look at the
weapons they have and a means of protecting themselves, too. I would use the
cluster bomb rather than risk the lives of a hundred or a thousand of my
protectors in hand-to-hand fighting. But then I was in that business once, so
perhaps I have a different view of it.
While I'm sure there are some, I've never met a soldier who wanted to fight a
war. But when they have to, they like to have equipment and weapons that work
and work effectively, because soldiers aren't in the business of dying. Dying
is not something you want to ask someone to do. So to maintain the equipment
and weapons, those who are protecting you need the best instructions they can
get whether those instructions are in a document or a training class.
Consider that if you're a good technical writer and you won't work on defense
projects or weapons projects or projects that might kill people, you might
actually be contributing to the deaths of people because they didn't get the
very best instructions they could get.
Frankly, I don't think you can escape the responsibility for killing occurring
by saying "I won't work in that area or on that project." As I said earlier,
you are protected by those things whether you want to be or not, so you benefit
from how those things are used whether you want to be or not. And your lack of
action may result in deaths as surely as if you had aimed a weapon and fired it.
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