Social Distancing and Social Justice
Like so many, I am social distancing. Being old, I am following the advice to remain at home. Unlike so many of my fellow Americans, however, this has not been a hardship. I do worry about contracting the coronavirus, but I have every advantage in helping me avoid it. I live in a nice home in a small town on a pension. I can have groceries delivered, order anything else I need online and have it delivered too. The fact that I can afford to do all this owes a great deal to being raised in a good, safe home, with plenty of food and health care, and access to a good education. Sure I have worked hard, but no harder than many without these advantages and not as hard as many others.
But this reflection is not about me. Nor is it about the doctors, nurses, 911 call center workers, first responders and police officers who are under constant stress and giving everything, including sometimes their lives, in the fight against COVID19. They deserve all the praise and thanks we can bestow. They are in so many ways the first and last line of defense against this killer. Volumes are and will be written about their empathy, courage, skills, and self-sacrifice. All the words of those volumes will be deserved – and insufficient to express the gratitude they are due.
Rather, this is about those for whom much less will be written - the ones who are making social distancing possible. This includes farmers who provide the fruits, vegetables, eggs, milk and meat that come to my table and the American and migrant farm workers - including the undocumented ones - that pick produce yet lack a decent wage and access to affordable health care. They don’t have the luxury of staying home to social distance. It is about the low wage workers in meat processing plants and the truckers who leave their families and risk disease to carry the goods that come to my door. It is about the order fulfillment workers in the distribution centers of such behemoths as Amazon and Walmart, and the UPS, FedEx, postal workers and other package handlers and drivers. It is about grocery store shelf stockers, baggers, cashiers, and delivery people. It is about those who staff food banks and hand out the staples of life at risk of their own while all I do is send them a donation. And it is certainly about the personal care and institutional health care aides who brave disease to help residents of nursing homes and assisted living centers, just as it is about the nursing aides, orderlies, food preparers, maintenance staff and even parking attendants in hospitals. Nor should we forget transit workers and ride-share drivers who take people to the doctor or hospital and those who collect the trash my social distancing produces.
I am in the top 30 percent of the income distribution of Americans. These people are not. Most are in the bottom 58 percent. Many make barely more than the minimum wage, which in nearly a third of states is at or below the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour. The median salary of an orderly or home health care worker is $27,860; of a long-haul truck driver, $46,850; and of an agricultural worker, $29,120. The typical food preparation worker earns $26,510 and a cashier just $24,400. An Amazon order fulfillment worker makes $15 an hour, just over $31,000 a year.
When this virus has been conquered, we will rightly thank scientists, public health and medical professionals. Their lives will, eventually I hope, return to normal, though some may need special care to recover from the trauma of their service to us. That normal will include a decent salary, health care, place to live and plentiful food to eat. There is a danger that we will forget all those others, for which normal is a much less plentiful and a much more tentative existence. We owe them more than that. Our gratitude does not put food on the table, assure them meaningful health insurance, affordable, safe and decent housing, and the good schools I had growing up. All those of us social distancing will also return to normal, but that normal must not forget those who helped us through this. If politics also returns to normal, acting as if those who give us so much help now are not deserving of help from us later, we will fail morally as a nation. Social justice demands we do more than say “thanks.”
During the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940, Prime Minister Winston Churchill said of the Royal Air Force, then battling the German Luftwaffe to save England from invasion, “Never was so much owed by so many to so few.” Eighty years later, as we battle a virus in a fight for our own lives, I want to say for myself and all the rest of us in the top 30 percent, “Never have so few owed so much to so many.”
Photo Credit: kelly-sikkema-unsplash
