"Incredibly Important...Largely Invisible"

All photos here are from recent deliveries

“An unprecedented coalition of workers from some of America’s largest companies will strike on Friday. Workers from Amazon, Instacart, Whole Foods, Walmart, Target, and FedEx are slated to walk out on work, citing what they say is their employers’ record profits at the expense of workers’ health and safety during the coronavirus pandemic.”

                                                                                         The Intercept April 28, 2020

When police officers, firefighters, paramedics, and military personnel sign on, they know it is a reasonable expectation that they will face danger and death.  Doctors and nurses in Emergency Departments also know that they will be dealing with extreme health crises that make them vulnerable to physical and emotional distress, and in the case of COVID-19, to critical illness and death.

When a person commits to delivering groceries, prepared food, packages of necessities and medicines, the risk to life and limb seem remote and negligible, but the coronavirus has changed all that.

In this new stay-at-home paradigm, many people are opting to have things delivered rather than venturing out in masks and gloves and standing in long lines.  Since these so-called gig economy workers are taking a risk performing these errands and could, conceivably become sick and even die, is it ethical to ask another person to take such dangerous measures to bring back our required items?

The virus does not discriminate; given the opportunity, it will infect everyone.  Whether or not it kills or just makes someone sick is not predictable.  Healthy people who are in good shape die as well as those with underlying conditions and co-morbidities.  Some people experience relatively minor symptoms while others might have one particular symptom, like trouble breathing or blinding headaches or loss of smell and taste.  Everyone seems to suffer from fever.  But the virus is not uniform in its impact, that much we know.

How the outbreak is managed does reveal discrimination.  Wealth, of course, brings better treatments, faster testing, and options like delivery of supplies, medications and necessities.  Money allows a more secure quarantine, better isolation, and options like technology infrastructure to facilitate working from home and accessing the internet.  The poor may have no internet access for children to attend school or parents to work remotely.  Many people in this situation are essential workers and must go to work every day, regardless if they have child care or not.  There is no money to hire others to shop and pick up necessities.  They must venture out and risk infection to obtain food and medicine.  There is, clearly, an impact on a specific economic class and this influences the way rich and poor experience COVID-19.

People with underlying health conditions simply must use these services because they are at greater risk of dying if they become infected.  So for those who have the resources to hire someone to deliver goods, is it ethical to pay a person to do these errands?  Yes, but the salary and tip amount must at least acknowledge the risk even if it can in no way fully compensate them for exposing themselves to danger.

The problem is in what way and how much to compensate them.  As stated above in the opening of The Intercept article, this is the issue with Amazon employees, grocery store personnel, delivery drivers, etc.  They are not being compensated for risking their health, and they are not given personal protection equipment to minimize the danger.  “These workers have been exploited so shamelessly for so long by these companies while performing incredibly important but largely invisible labor,” said Stephen Brier, a labor historian and professor at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies who is cited in the article.  “All of a sudden, they’re deemed essential workers in a pandemic…”  That is the part that is not ethical.  We would not ask a police officer to try to stop a crime without a gun, badge and radio; we would not ask a firefighter to go into a burning building without an oxygen tank strapped to his back.  How can we ask the delivery person, one who is barely getting along in this new gig economy, to risk life and limb to bring us our food and medicine without personal protection equipment or fair compensation?

There are a range of jobs that are dangerous in addition to those mentioned at the start of this piece.  In a capitalist society, how much do we pay for services that might threaten the life of the worker providing them?  This goes to the heart of recent ethical discussions about the manufacture of Apple products in China and the health of migrant farmworkers in California.  Certainly, Amazon can afford to pay employees more, even give them hazard pay, and at least provide them with the equipment necessary to protect themselves on the job.  This goes for any job where a person puts herself in close contact with others to provide services.

In the push to reopen the country, lives are at stake.  When Trump says that business leaders are pleading with him to end the restrictions, they see workers as cogs in the machine.  They cannot be thinking how best to keep their employees safe.  That should be the first, most human priority.  When workers become links in a great chain of supply and demand, we cannot continue to use the current model of work them until they drop and then replace them with another and carry on.

The consequences of not treating those on the frontlines of the pandemic with care and compensation will lead to what is now beginning to happen:  shutdowns of essential services like the factories that process and prepare food supplies.  What will we do if we cannot hire people to pick up our groceries because there are no groceries available, or worse, no people left to bring them?  What if every employee in the factory or the lettuce field becomes ill and cannot work?  Employers must protect their employees in these essential businesses—pay them better, give them protection equipment, and manage them to keep them healthy and on the job.  Those utilizing the services must tip abundantly and graciously to show appreciation for the risks taken.  This will take not only an ethical commitment to do what is right, but a financial commitment as well, but in the new COVID-19 reality, that is what must be done.

Down and Out In London and Paris

There is a saying attributed to everyone from Winston Churchill to a number of evangelists:  “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”  Some sources add, “and don’t stop to take pictures.”  Humor and encouragement in a single packet of words.

In the summer of 1999, we took 23 freshmen and sophomore high school students on a nine day trip to London and Paris.  Both cities were experiencing unprecedented heat and humidity, making for a deeply unpleasant tour.  There was no A/C in any hotel where we stayed.  We had to move all of us through the cities on foot, often during rush hour, using public transportation.  We spread out through the crowds on the subway platforms (the Tube and the Metro) and when the car arrived, we had to push our way in and hope no one got left behind.  Then I would shout out the destination so all the students would know when to get off.  Miraculously, we never lost anyone.

However, the students were often less than cooperative.  One called her mother back in the states to complain that we were not allowing her enough time to shop.  One got lost at night on the way back to the hotel from dinner.  She spent several late hours wandering the streets of Paris and only by some miracle of fate, managed to find her way back to the hotel by check in for the evening.  We had told the students to carry the hotel address in their pocket or wallets for just such an emergency; she had not followed the directions.

Once, after we had settled in for the night, we got a frantic phone call from students saying their room was flooding.  We rushed up two flights of stairs to find water cascading from cracks in the ceiling and running down the walls.  I ran upstairs to the room above where we also had students and banged on the door.  A girl answered, in near panic, saying, “We were just trying to call you.  Something is wrong in the bathroom.”  I ran through the room and burst into the bathroom to find one of my students fighting to control the hand-held shower nozzle which was writhing in her hands like an enraged viper spitting a voluminous stream of water around the room to pool on the floor.  I grabbed the nozzle from her and was immediately soaked to the skin before I could shut it off.  I breathed a sigh of relief but then realized I was standing with one of my female students in her hotel bathroom with only a very modest towel between us.  I even more quickly ran from the room and let my wife, also a chaperone, deal with the clean-up.

We were up and running from 6AM until whenever we could snatch a few hours of sleep.  We were constantly dehydrated and ate sparingly; the food provided by the tour company was abominable (as was the useless “tour guide”) and no one really had an appetite due to the heat and humidity.  On one of the final days in Paris, I passed out in the Louvre.

A good moment—and there were a few—was coming back to the hotel at the end of a too long day.  I would take a cold shower and chug down three 1.5 liter bottles of water and then pass out for a few blissful hours of sleep.  It was not healthy; we sustained damage.  I did not have a bowel movement for nine days.  I had only recently been diagnosed with Type II diabetes and could not control my blood sugars or my neuropathy.  The flight home from Paris, roughly ten hours, nearly killed me.  I thought my intestines would explode—although, if that relieved some of the pressure, I was willing to let them fly.  I sweated through my clothes which felt like cardboard due to all the perspiration they had absorbed over those hellish days.  I was feverish and barely remember relinquishing responsibility to the parents who greeted us at the airport upon our return.

What did I learn from this?  Never take charge of 23 kinds in a foreign country, even a U.S. ally.  Second, the quote above applies.  We could not cut the trip short and go back where we came from, so our only option was to keep going and get through the nine days.  We did stop to take a few pictures just to have evidence of what happened.

I do not consider London and Paris hell; in fact, along with New York, they are my three favorite cities on earth.  In the end, we got through it, didn’t lose anyone, and saw some incredible places.  Sometimes we must face difficulties to understand ourselves and our world, and it can be a life-changing moment if we seize the day and keep ourselves open to what we see and experience.  We just have to be willing to keep going.

The Dark Wood

Dante Alighieri

“Midway along the journey of our life I woke to find myself in a dark wood, for I had wandered off from the straight path.”

                                                                                 Dante Alighieri  The Divine Comedy

Are there more powerful words to open the saga of a middle-aged man questioning everything in his life?  Dante was 35 years old in 1300 AD, and therefore half way to 70, which was an ancient life span at the time.  Most people died in their late 50s and early 60s.  Many others did not survive infancy.

It is the expression of it, the way the lines are written and translated—“I woke to find myself in a dark wood…”  We have all had mornings like this.  We may be having one right now, in the middle of a pandemic when nothing is as it used to be.

Then, Dante the character in the poem written by Dante the poet, is assailed by three beasts:  a leopard, a lion, and a she-wolf.  The leopard “sprang up,” “trim and very swift.”  Dante fixates on the leopard’s spots.  He calls the leopard a “gaudy beast.”  Next, he is confronted by a lion, proud and tall, “the air around him seemed to fear his presence.”  Finally, the she-wolf, “ racked with every kind of greediness.”  The female does not merit the kind of ferocious attributes of the leopard and the lion in an interesting bit of thinly disguised discrimination of the time.  She is the depraved one.

Dante was living in exile when he wrote The Divine Comedy, having been banished from his home when he was caught up in civil unrest and falsely accused of corruption and financial improprieties.  His assets were seized and he was ordered to pay a large fine, which he refused to do; so on pain of death he was ordered to never set foot in his city again.  Florence was his world, the cityscape and cultural life he loved.  Now, he was cut off, ostracized, labeled an absconder.  He was devastated, crushed.

We know that change is the way of this life yet people do not like it, they fear it even, and often resist with every fiber of their being.  But change happens and resistance to it is a waste of spirit.  We are all, occasionally, exiles in our own lives.  We cannot go back to the past; that is another country beyond our reach.  All we have is the now, the immediate moment.

We have been changed by COVID-19.  We cannot say we didn’t see this coming.  It is in every piece of apocalyptic fiction, countless films, dreamscapes, the pixelated playing fields of video games.  If you can dream of it, it is within the realm of the possible.  Beyond creatively imagining our end, there is science and its dire threats:  Ebola, HIV/AIDS, SARS, MRSA, H1N1—read The Coming Plague (Penguin, 1994) by Laurie Garrett.  She lays it out for us.  Virus and bacteria, microscopic as they are, have always hunted us.  But here’s the deal:  they want us alive at least long enough to shed as much virus as possible.  So these creatures keep mutating until they do not kill us outright.  Is this what COVID-19 is doing?  That seems to be what the scientists are saying.

So what we are confronted with here is not gaudy, proud and angry, or greedy.  Those are human attributes.  COVID-19 has no time for sentiment or emotion or human reasoning; it is simple-minded and focused.  It has one mission and one only:  infect everything.

Until science tells us more, offers a cure, a vaccine, or a mitigation pharmaceutical, we must keep social distancing.  We must wear the mask, glove up, and stay indoors away from loved ones and strangers.  That leaves us isolated and lets our minds wander to darker scenarios.  What if the life we know never returns?  The short answer is, it won’t, and we must deal with that.

Life is uncertain.  Life is fluid.  Our time here is brief when compared to the rocks that sleep in the earth.  The trees in the dark wood have been alive longer than us, and will remain long after we are gone.  We are only, in our limited life span, travelers through this land.

Change is death to the former world.  Change is where we must adapt and look for the light.  The fact that we will one day be gone gives our lives importance, it gives our lives heft, power and meaning.  As we fly through our dreams of chaos and carnivals, we will discover that change ultimately brings the future.

But to get there we must first navigate this dark wood.