Tomorrow, in America, we celebrate Memorial Day. We pause to honor and mourn the men and women of our Armed forces who have died in service to our country.
However, in this twisted time, a new global war conscripts a different type of soldier, wearing a different sort of uniform. Instead of Army Greens, this infantry dons scrubs, aprons, Pullman Brown and Dickies denims.
They are caring for our forgotten elders, stocking shelves and delivering supplies. They are toiling in fields, factories and warehouses to ensure the nation’s food chain functions. They are keeping our public transport on life support. They are nursing the ill and processing the dead.
This letter is an elegy to them.
The front lines are not the perilous, but fortified, desert camps. They are the subway tracks and outer-borough hospitals, the slaughterhouses and prisons, the distribution centers and grocery stores.
The heroism of this corps is not the glory stuff of Mandela and Chavez, though they are predominantly people of color. Their heroics are, instead, unheralded, nameless and fameless, fighting an invisible enemy that cannot be slain, only grimly flattened.
There is little grandeur to it. No medals. No Pomp and Circumstance. But, in this moment of collective heart-ache, they have kept us going. If vulnerability is synonymous with courage, then these folks are among history’s bravest.
They have been dubbed “essential workers.” Yet they are so under-resourced that Sujatha Gidla, a New York City subway conductor, describes his colleagues not as essential but as sacrificial. The list of those we now remember grows: Yolanda Woodberry, who worked as a bus driver in Philadelphia for 17 years; Rakkhon Kim, a letter carrier in the Bronx; Saul Sanchez, Eduardo Conchas de la Cruz and Tibursio Rivera López, who all worked at the same meatpacking plant in Colorado.
As I type, I pull my Buff mask up over my stinging eyes in shame. The words of Gandhi haunt me, “the true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members.” How can we let this happen?
Memorial Day. Summer opens its doors. A white-walled Studebaker rolls down Main Street. Old Sergeant Murphy, the last of the Greatest Generation rides shotgun, waving a pint-sized flag. The band blares Sousa. The beach house is unshuttered. We take the wire brush to the barbecue. A flapping roadside balloon man touts a clearance sale at the local Ford dealer. No, not this year.
It is bleak but there is a greater calling.
How do we properly honor these heroes? Men and women who didn’t enlist to be the bulwark against apocalyptical chaos, but nevertheless showed up for battle in paper armor.
We can value thoughts and prayers, a commemorative wreath and a trumpet’s mournful Taps. But our hearts know this is not enough.
The lucky undrafted must undergo a deep moral inventory to determine how to fittingly exalt these inadvertent warriors, some of whom have made the ultimate sacrifice just by going to work.
It cannot be a mere gesture, a flimsy meme (or this insubstantial letter). Gratitude is the work and action we undertake that recognizes the gift that we have been given.
It begins with the explicit recognition that sanitation workers, emergency room nurses, grocery clerks and meatpackers have always been essential. They did not enlist for heroism nor court the grandiosity of the Blue Angels. In fact, in our hero worship, we risk absolving our own complicity in the atrocity of our structural failures.
What our essential workers desperately require is protective gear, a raise, comprehensive health care, proper sick leave, and organizations to advocate on their behalf.
They deserve access to well-being; movement, restoration and nutrition that reduce the conditions of comorbidity, stress and anxiety.
And, yes, they warrant the respect and support of our government, the most rudimentary return of their tax dollars.
If we are to honor them then we must demand that our leadership provide these basic needs and where they cannot, we must ask ourselves to furnish them where we can.
Patriotism is not protesting mask-wearing on the capital’s steps. It is sacrificing so someone else’s child you don’t know in another state can have health insurance.
If there is any small tribute we can muster, it is to put aside our petty differences and individual material needs to find common decency, to better align our human condition with our highest principles.
For to honor the other is to honor the self, not only because we all share a divine nature, but because our very existence depends on them.
Let this Day of Remembrance draw upon the phantoms of our past and harness its pain to project a world that narrows the disparity of the human experience towards justice.