Hospitality

Be forewarned. This is another rant, courtesy of me.

Definition:

" 1. the friendly reception and treatment of guests or strangers.
2. the quality or disposition of receiving and treating guests and strangers in a warm, friendly, generous way. "

It just floors me how little anyone values this old-fashioned virtue these days.

The world is much too full of businesses.

You see, business institutions do not value hospitality. The only reason for exercising generosity (or, rather, the appearance thereof), since it invariably costs you money, is if it gets you something. Every relationship is one of utility, and there is no more hospitality - only the base, groveling behaviour that is better known as schmoozing.

This, if nothing else, is the strongest testimony to the fact that the place I am currently employed does not aim itself at the betterment and education of humanity as its primary aim. It is, before all else, a business institution. Time and time again it has failed in upholding the Christian tenants of hospitality - tenants that are supposed to be intrinsic to the ideology it was supposedly founded to uphold. However, it is too gain-focused to have even considered these sorts of things into even the most basic University functions. Seven tickets per graduating student - that's it. No room for non-graduating students, no room for the large Catholic families of graduating students or those of family friends. I mean, we simply have to make sure we reserve enough room for all of our VIPs! After all, this University is primarily a special-interest club for old people wearing Prada, right?

This place never fails to disappoint me . . . and this infamous charade continues to defraud the world of what it actually needs, bidding it satisfy itself on the only thing it has to give - i.e., its own shallow self-importance.

Full well I know how unusual a background I have come from. However, I also know how much the laziness of the "real world" wants people like me adjust our expectations to its ineptitudes, "seeing life as it is". My first reaction is to condemn the supporters of so-called "reality" as madmen - for indeed, there is nothing more insane than merely seeing life as it is, and never how it should be.

However, what's worse, though, is that it would be one thing for the supporters of the status-quo to ignore the impossible dream. Dreamers, after all, are hard to come by - few people are willing to live life quite that fully. What's infinitely worse is that the dream is FAR from impossible. In fact, in this case, at least, a small community of much poorer, wiser people have been living this simple, uncomplicated dream called "hospitality" for over 35 years. Given that fact, I simply cannot understand why it is that people attempt to use "reality" as an excuse for blatant stupidity. Just because people are stupid doesn't mean they have to stay that way.