Conflicted achievements

By Patricia Hunt
Published: August 29, 2008

My mother and I finished watching a movie on her DVD player and switched back to television. The screen filled with whirling Chinese in red and yellow costumes. Has there ever been a more dazzling display of color, sound and movement, darkness and light, than the closing ceremony of the Beijing Olympics? I could not turn away; I was captivated. And yet … and yet I knew there was an underside to this.
Apparently laborers who built much of the infrastructure and the buildings for the Olympics were hustled out of town before the grand event took place. Like the little girl with the beautiful voice but whose face was not quite pretty enough to be on camera, the workers weren’t the kind of folk the Chinese wanted to present to the world. Many houses were destroyed to clear a space for the Olympics, and it isn’t clear to me what happened to the people who used to live in them. Any dissent that might have brought problems out in the open was quickly squashed.
I have to admit that the Chinese are not the only ones to accomplish great things at a price that makes us cringe. In fact, we Americans used Chinese laborers to create our own miracle of engineering, the Transcontinental Railroad. The phrase, “He doesn’t have a Chinaman’s chance,” came from the practice of lowering a Chinese worker in a basket to light the fuse when it was necessary to blast through rock as the railroad was being built. A lot of the time, the fuse lighter didn’t survive. The human cost of this project was high. Like today’s Chinese government, we mostly celebrated that accomplishment and ignored the price paid by the people who did the work.
Monticello is regarded as the most architecturally important private residence ever built in the United States. I have been through it many times. As much as I appreciate its beauty, I know full well the role of slaves in its construction and maintenance. I am also aware that Thomas Jefferson died broke and would have not even had a roof over his head had it not been for the fact that no one was going to kick Jefferson out of Monticello. Living beyond your means is not a new problem.
I have never seen the pyramids in Egypt, but I would love to travel there some day. I am fairly sure that they were not built using volunteer labor. This was not the project of a Habitat for Humanity group. They are glorious, but human sweat and misery are surely in every stone. The same could be said for the Roman Coliseum.
I have never decided exactly what I should think about human achievements created with the involuntary sacrifices of so many. Should I shun them? Should I honor the people who created them by preserving them? If the laborers who paid the price could tell me what to think, what would they say? Would the slaves of Monticello want the thing burned to the ground, or would they want that which took so much from them kept forever as a monument of lasting beauty that continues to bear their fingerprints?
Would there be a consensus among them? Did the Chinese laborers find a television somewhere and swell with pride that they helped create the spectacle that thrilled the world, or did they feel unfairly used? I have no idea.
I don’t think I will ever solve this conundrum. Something in me is drawn into these works despite my reservations about how they were created. I hope I never forget the sacrifices that were made. Maybe all such endeavors should have to have a stone with the names of everyone involved engraved on it. There are people who would disagree with me. “The play’s the thing.” Or the poem or pyramid or closing ceremony. The work transcends its creators and takes on a life of its own. Maybe. Most Chinese seem to think so. They are proud of their nation and its Olympics.
I keep looking forward to the day when the tension between great achievements and Jefferson’s ringing affirmation that all people “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” can be resolved. Jefferson failed to do so at Monticello, but he held it out as a beacon to guide us into a more enlightened future. I hope his confidence turns out to be prophetic.
Patricia Hunt, of Staunton, is a chaplain at Mary Baldwin College.