No man is an island

In 1624 John Donne wrote a rather short poem which has effected me since I first read it as a child.

When I first read this simple verse at the age of 12 or so I related it the Boy Scout's motto to do a good turn every day, I suppose I still consider it valid. Give something back to people in need.

When next I read it, at 16 or so, it was required reading/memorization for an English class, and I was told what it meant, and who I was, how I mattered to the rest of the world. Honestly, I felt pretty small at the time and figured somebody was blowing smoke up my nether regions.

Many years of my life had passed, work, responsibility, even just general life and then I read it again (I must have been early 30's). This time; I read that 'No man can only be an island' a minor point, and perhaps unintended, but that's what any art requires; interpretation.

Since that time I've found my own ways to give back to the island, to the whole. I'm not looking for kudos so don't send them, I'm just giving examples. I 'spent' about 1000 hours to become a unpaid solo reserve police officer, I 'spent' 300 hours to become a certified search and rescue volunteer, add in hours for man tracking, a few other dozen topics, training, teaching and other concepts and I feel happy with who I am. At the same time these obsessions, if you will,
took time away from my wife and 2 boys. I just hope my service teaches them what I should have been there to show them.

So now I finally get to the point of the post. Damn that took awhile, carefully digging through this mind of mine.
No man is an island and neither is our economy.
I'm not stupid, but I guess you figured that out or you wouldn't have read this far. Until recently I really haven't bothered to figure out how my job relates to others, I guess I just like my check and as long as people are getting paid it's cool.
But how does your company effect the local economy? We've lost half of our work force over the last 16 months and it really does have a huge impact on the economy beyond what happened to the people we laid off. While I want to point out their losses I'm going to skip that for now so you can see what it means beyond them even though they are really very important to me).

The tire company only get's 1/3 of the re-treds we used to ask for. We sent back 1/8 of the forklifts. I canceled the AC maintenance company we've used for several years. We've gone from three days of cleaning to 1 day, all the employees need to empty their own trash and wipe their own desks. We'll use spare time to cut the lawns with a mower we have in storage. We trained somebody to resharpen all of the saw blades we use.
They don't seem like major issues but when you consider the full impact, do you see how many jobs have been lost, just by my company cutting back to stay in business? It's not just accumulative, it multiplies losses 3-5 times when you think about it. We're one fairly
small company of (originally) 150 people, consider what a company like Intel with 15,000 people have cut back on.

No island is just a man, or a group of men; every island is a part of the whole. Should one island or a portion of an island fall so to will all other islands fall and then the men with them.

Never send for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee... it tolls for us all.

Rick