The Guilt of Walking Around in a Broken Economy
A broken economy wants to numb us. We can't let it.
A low-wage worker’s life is hard. It is hoping the impossible math of your bills suddenly becomes possible. It is hoping a new job, new raise, or new life may emerge. It is hoping for a gift from the heavens, a winning lawsuit, or a lottery ticket that brings you to the top.
It is a lot of hoping, and a lot of being let down.
Our broken economy is bad for the millions of workers who do not get what they deserve.
But it is bad for the rest of us too.
You walk into a restaurant and you see the server and you know. You book a car and you know. You order delivery and you know. You hire a person to clean your home and you know.
You know their life is hard. You know it doesn’t work for them. You know they are not getting what they need and what they deserve.
You know because you were once that person — or because you never were and you know how rare that is.
In a country with a broken economy, every ordinary transaction becomes weighty. It carries the guilt of knowing that the person in front of you is struggling and you can only do so much about it.
The guilt is not the problem. The guilt is a correct reading of a broken system.
Early on, we quell that guilt through action. We use it to tip better, to donate to worker organizations, and to help change our systems.
What frightens me, though, is that as systems do not change, we begin to quell that guilt through another choice: numbness.
The guilt gets heavy, so we shut it off. We stop paying attention. We stop looking into the eyes of the person serving us, we stop hearing the uncertainty in their voice, we stop using the power we have to make things right.
If we are not careful, our broken and still breaking economy results in fewer people caring. So the system breaks further, so fewer people care, and it breaks more.
What is at stake is our compassion for working people. The things that are hard want to make us callous — callous to things we do not want to be callous to.
We have seen it happen. We call workers heroes in times of extraordinary need. We mean it. And then we forget.
That is the clock we have to beat.
To learn more about what I’m working on, read Start Here.
If you have not yet, you may enjoy my first piece Who Deserves More.