Please Hold Your Applause

Yeah, you. The one posting the memes about heroic grocery store workers and medical personnel. The one posting all the heartwarming stories about our collective outpourings of love and appreciation for the people doing the hard work right now, out in the world where viruses can find them. The one sharing articles about how we should all help keep these front line workers healthy. The one sharing posts about the cool ways teachers are filling in the education gaps and the heroic blue collar workers making sorely-needed stuff. You even put up some of those cartoons comparing them to superheroes.

Just hold on for a second.

It's not that these aren't great sentiments. It's not that the front line workers don't deserve a giant truckload of your personal "Hey thanks for fixing it so I was less likely to die" gratitude. It's not that we shouldn't all say, "Thank you for your service." It's not that there is something wonderful about the literal parades of thankful citizens. Because they deserve every bit of that.

But weren't you the one, not a few months ago, complaining about the foolishness of raising the minimum wage to $15/hour? Weren't you the one arguing how Those People want to just steal from the hard-working well-deserving rich folks who have by God earned their money doing Really Important Things? When a nurse near you was complaining about being overworked and underpaid in Ordinary Times, did I not see you shrug and mutter something about what "goes with the job"? Aren't you the person who routinely argues that if people don't want to live with poverty wages and no health insurance, they should have gotten more education so they could land better jobs? Or maybe you were the one who was quietly ignoring all of these issues, figuring they were somebody else's problem.

Okay, maybe that was then and this is now. Maybe you've seen the error of your ways. Maybe you know better now.

But still. Just hold on.

It's not that you shouldn't be appreciative now. You should. But given your past performance, it rings a little hollow. So while this is still going on, be grateful, be appreciative, and for heaven's sake, try, as much as possible, to be part of the solution and not part of the problem.

But hold that applause. Hold onto those warm thoughts.

Hold onto them for a few months. Hold onto them until this mess has passed.

And then, if you're really still feeling this vibe, this "hooray for health care and blue collar workers who keep our country function ing and its people alive they really are te backbone of our nation" vibe, here are some things you can do.

When the subject of a minimum living wage in this country comes up, as it will, be a vocal supporter of a minimum wage raise. Hound your elected representative. Speak out. When CEOs whine that it's just not fiscally possible, remind them that when the economy slowed to a crawl, the people who kept the basic actions, the basic "take the customer's money" lifeblood of business flowing-- those were not the multimillionaires in the C-suites, but the front line workers. Do not accept the claim that the jobs are unimportant; we are living through the proof that this is not so.

And pay attention to the issues of pay. Things like the crappy rules that let restaurant owners pay workers less than three dollars an hour--even when they aren't serving customers, or the rules that let bosses give someone a fake "promotion" to a salaried position, so that the worker puts in way more hours for virtually no more pay. Things like the many tricks for committing wage theft. Does it all seem kind of obscure and wonky? Go study up.

Become a vocal supporter of affordable health care for all. I'm not going to be picky; you can go help picket the local MegaMart to push them to provide insurance for every single worker, or you can start hounding your elected representative for Medicare for All or some form of single payer health care.

And,  at a minimum, paid sick days.

Treat people who do these kinds of work with respect, every single day for the rest of your life. Treat them like human beings who are just as important as you are, and not like The Help.

Vote like it matters. Stop voting for people who think only rich folks matter.

When you hear bout them having to work in crappy conditions, like teaching in schools that are falling apart or working hospitals that are crumbling or being systematically mistreated and ripped off by their bosses, make a fuss. None of your business? Baloney-- as of the moment you decided these folks are heroes, it became your business.

Look, do you think these people are heroes? Well, heroes deserve to make enough money to live on. They deserve to have good, affordable health care so that illness or accident do not result in financial ruin. Heroes working heroically in heroic jobs deserve not to have to listen to a bunch of baloney about how their jobs aren't "good" jobs, especially when the reason they aren't good jobs is because the rest of us stood by and let the powers that be turn them into crappy jobs.

If you think these folks are heroes now, then please by God hold that thought until things get back to normalish, and demand that they be treated like heroes then. And don't accept bullshit about how we can't afford to treat them better-- in this century alone, we have somehow found trillions of dollars to "rescue" all sorts of folks and corporations. What we're discovering right now is that we can't afford for these people to not be on the front lines for us as a country.

(P.S. For all of you posting about how great it is that it's the music and performance and the arts that are getting us through-- you can back that up by making sure that the artists that are getting you through are getting paid.)