Total Diversity

Companies everywhere want a widen their applicant pool. Like a broader-shouldered Mark Spitz, they need room to spread out and give everyone an equal opportunity. What’s wrong with casting a larger recruitment net? Any fisherman knows that hand-to-hand fishing will only yield subpar results. Unless you consider slimy hands and tired arms two fine signs of sustained success. Weirdly, not every group is included in this essential push towards greater representation.

Ugly people. Where are they in all this? You know the kind I’m referring to. Not your average decent-looking person, but someone who’s mere appearance is physically taxing. The type of person you want to look at on an empty stomach, in case you’re not mentally prepared for a casual glance. These are individuals who you never meet at any place that serves food. It’s far too risky. These hideous oddities remain mercifully indescribable. Picasso’s greatest contributions to the field of art would’ve been rendered obsolete after one espresso with one these poor souls. He wouldn’t have seen the point to paint what God’s already perfected. However, that doesn’t mean we can’t work alongside them. While beauty is only skin deep,  ugliness does tend to block exits. That said, the perspective they bring to an office is invaluable. With them in the mix, there’s no need to wistfully recall the bygone era of Coney Island freak shows, when the spawn of prawns and the litter of critters drew spectators from all over. To gawk and to ogle, but mostly, to learn. 

Let’s forget ugly people if you can. Although, the trauma experienced from their unsightly visages tattooed on your cerebellum make that likely a mathematical impossibility. But please do do try. Stupid people are also nowhere to be found. And that’s not just because they are out chasing after garbage trucks and howling at the moons of Jupiter (there’s something so cliché about howling at our moon that even morons understand it now - howling did lead to the birth of NASA). It’s because they can’t get inside boardrooms and conference rooms and living rooms where big decisions are made. At least not without being ridiculed and ignored. But they usually have lots of things to say. You nod along when you see them on subway platforms or read them in the pages of The New York Times. Stupid people possess a certain freedom that intelligence and education beats out of the rest of us. They aren’t bound by the same rules we are. They are free to criticize sacred cows while displaying an everlasting love for the deeply irreligious bovines we tend to dismiss.

When those are the animals we should be listening to and learning from. They are the ones who should be permitted to graze outside of office lactation rooms. These isn’t your average herd of livestock. These are cows formed by the enlightenment, by Montesquieu, Locke, and Rousseau. They question why Cartesian math isn’t called Descartesian math. They’ll laugh at your jokes about burgers and milk, but they’ll bring new perspectives. You may cheer those you love and boo those you hate, but when’s the last time you had a really good reason to moo?