What Does Sacrifice Mean Nowadays?

The word of the coming year is sacrifice.

With a crippled economy and rising unemployment, people are being asked to make sacrifices. On the eve of his election, Barack Obama said that the American people are ready to "turn the page on policies that have put greed and irresponsibility before hard work and sacrifice."

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California said the state's budget cuts "will require sacrifice from everyone."

And FedEx CEO Fred Smith announced this month that 36,000 employees will be taking a mandatory 5 percent to 10 percent pay cut — and he will take a 20 percent reduction in base salary — to help prevent the package-delivery company from laying people off. "These steps are absolutely necessary," Smith told shareholders, "and will require shared sacrifice from the top down and across the FedEx workforce."

All this talk of sacrifice raises questions: Is it really a sacrifice if you are forced to do something? Is one person's sacrifice just another person's pain in the, um, neck? And, come to think of it, what does sacrifice mean anymore?

Shared And Willing Sacrifices

To be meaningful as a sacrifice, says Carolyn Marvin, a cultural historian at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication, the burden should be shouldered by everyone, and it has to be willingly made. If it's obvious that one group is doing the sacrificing and another one isn't, Marvin says, "it's visibly unjust."

Sacrifices, says Marvin, "have to be shared."

For example, Marvin says, "There was a moment of higher good following the tragedy in 2001 when the towers were attacked, that Americans were ready to make a special effort. Sacrifices would have been willingly shared." Some Americans made a sacrifice and joined the military effort. But most "were never called on to do that," Marvin says, despite raging wars and a growing energy crisis.

Now with Wall Street spiraling downward and unemployment spiraling upward, a majority of Americans are finally being called on to make sacrifices. But there is not a sense that the widespread economic sacrifice is for the greater good.

The primo example of national sacrifice — shared and willing — is World War II, seen by most Americans to be a just war to which all Americans contributed. That war helped pull the country out of another tumultuous time: the Great Depression.

This time around, Marvin says, America again has an ailing economy that touches everyone, but the justness of its two wars is challenged. "This is a time of shared sacrifice, but people are not willing," Marvin says. Such an imbalance, she adds, "doesn't improve public morale."

If the sacrifices that are demanded now can be re-cast by the new administration as contributing to a greater good that everyone can work toward, Marvin says, the disgruntlement might well be reversed. "That would be good for the country practically," Marvin says, "and good for our mutual confidence in one another."

Everyday Sacrifices

The word originally had a religious meaning: the ritual slaughter of an animal or person to appease the gods. In the Old Testament, for instance, Abraham was called upon by God to offer up his son Isaac as a sacrifice.

Eventually, Shakespeare seized the word and used it to speak of Romeo and Juliet as sacrifices to the Montague-Capulet family feud. "As rich shall Romeo's by his lady's lie," said old man Capulet. "Poor sacrifices of our enmity!"

Since that late 16th century utterance, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word has also meant the surrender of something great for the sake of something greater. We hear it in baseball, as in sacrifice bunts and flies. And in chess, as in sacrificing a pawn. But we haven't heard it much in popular American parlance in the past few years.

"Every time we make a decision," says Dennis Keenan, author of The Question of Sacrifice, "We sacrifice something that matters to us. That is, every time we make a decision, we say yes to one thing and no to other things about which we likewise care."

Enforced Sacrifices

As George Santayana wrote, nothing so much enhances a good as to make sacrifices for it.

So FedEx workers should be feeling good about the pay reduction, right? On the message board of the Memphis Commercial Appeal, FedEx employees, former employees and family members weighed in on the corporate decision. Many posted notes commending FedEx for saving jobs. "Everybody's understanding," says FedEx spokesman Jess Bunn. "Look at the current economic situation. The economy is bad and getting worse. A lot of companies chose to eliminate people; FedEx didn't."

Not everyone is happy about the cuts. As one salaried employee wrote on the bulletin board, the salary cuts "for the low-end folks will be a lot tougher than for the six-figure people."

And another FedEx employee observed: "I never want to see someone lose their job because even my worst enemies have families to feed, but there are far too many people at FedEx taking advantage of the fact that you practically have to kill someone to get fired. Now that these people are affecting my income and my way of life, I say good riddance!"

What we need, says Keenan, are "leaders who have the broad-based trust of the people, leaders who can patiently articulate the complicated issues of our times ... leaders who can encourage others to make decisions that benefit the common good."

Keenan adds, "I am suspicious of across-the-board cuts. Some workers are obviously more at risk than others. Asking different people to make different sacrifices is often perceived in this country as unfair, but again, this is where strong, trusted leadership is crucial."

Mahatma Gandhi, who knew a thing or two about sacrifice, once said, "The mice which helplessly find themselves between the cat's teeth acquire no merit from their enforced sacrifice."

And what about people who don't want to make the sacrifice? "I don't know if there is any choice to it," says FedEx's Bunn. "The choice, I guess, would be for them to look for other alternatives."