Honoring COVID-19 Heroes with More Than Yard Signs

I’m grateful for the current groundswell of interest for those people serving in our retirement homes, grocery stores and health care facilities. We are giving tremendous shout-outs to people in service sector jobs like farm workers and bus drivers. There are homemade signs and commercials celebrating people in essential manufacturing jobs, such as those making personal protective equipment or supplying things critical to our infrastructure.

Now that we can see the courage and perseverance of people essential to our day to day lives, let’s take another step.

How about granting a living wage to the certified nursing assistant and single mother tasked with cleaning the body of a deceased loved one that died in a nursing home?

Why not provide health benefits to the father of three scrubbing the floor of our grocery store, and to the immigrant housekeeper cleaning the bathroom in our hotel room?

Why not allow the public worker in Wisconsin organize a union since their voice has no power to negotiate with an entire state? Aren’t workers the best to define what is needful for a dignified work environment?

What if we actually asked the migrant worker who picked the tomatoes we bought the other day what would meaningfully honor them (beyond that million-dollar flyover and emergency vehicle parade)?

And about the person who delivered your food order. They simply want to work hard for a college degree without burying themselves in tens of thousands of dollars of debt?

Let’s not celebrate the COVID-19 heroes while shutting our ears to their cries as they struggle to get by. We need to put our political energy where our mouth (or our homemade sign) is. Bailing out large corporations and banks may feel critical for those who rely on them, but let’s not compensate the giants while shortchanging the little guy upon whose backs the giant’s wealth is built.

Our obsession with the Dow Jones industrial average, the gross domestic product, or the wellbeing of companies like JP Morgan or AIG baffles me. I understand that economic engines are a means by which people provide for their families. But our fixation on economic flourishing at the expense of human flourishing, civil rights, and the environment are wrong-headed.

I leave you with this quote from a Robert Kennedy speech made in 1968.

“The gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play.  It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”