“In these uncertain times,” every other commercial on TV solemnly intones, “We want to thank our heroes. Nurses, doctors, first responders. Thank you.” Occasionally, they will mention supermarket clerks, as a nice treat for any supermarket clerks who are watching. Way to go, guys! You made it sometimes.
A graphic is displayed on the screen. It says “Thank you.” The upshot of this is that our Heroes are now thanked. Transaction finished. Back to work, everyone.
The intention here, I suppose, is nothing more than to let these essential workers know that they are appreciated. “It’s tough out there right now,” society is saying. “We understand that, we emphasize with that, and as a token of our esteem, we’ve bought you a Hang In There poster. Look at that adorable cat! Such a great sentiment. Anyway, toodles.”
This is, if I’m using the most charitable word I can here, inadequate.
If we cared about these people, we would be doing more. That’s the takeaway here. Instead of using those ads to say “Veidt Industries wants to thank all the brave heroes out there,” they could use that time to say, “Wearing facemasks keeps nurses alive.” Instead of saying, “Weyland-Yutani is thankful to have such a strong team keeping America running,” they could say, “At Weyland-Yutani, we are providing hazard pay to all the employees putting themselves in danger coming in to work, and will continue until the pandemic subsides.”
But no, there’s none of that. The best we get is Allison Janney for Kaiser saying to wash up, and Toyota Jan telling us that if we want to buy a car, then Toyota will magnanimously allow us to do so.
Because we call people heroes, but we don’t do the logical next thing and treat them like heroes. If that word means anything, it’s that this is a distinguished person, the kind of person we want more of. But if our actions mean anything, it’s that Sure, we want more of them, but not enough to help these ones.
That’s a contradiction, but it’s not a surprising one. We do the same thing with veterans: we call them heroes, shove them into war, where they get broken mentally and physically, and then bring them home under the eye of an overloaded VA system that just can’t do enough to help. It’s our way to believe a thanks solves a problem that requires money and willpower.
The only people who we both call heroes and treat as heroes are the ones who deserve it the least: athletes. That’s not to denigrate anyone, but one thing this pandemic has laid bare is the simple fact that a society needs a person who stocks grocery shelves more than it needs a person to put on a baseball uniform and try to hit a ball with a stick.
But athletes get everything that heroes are supposed to get. They have first-rate medical care, and great food, and great pay, and exactly as much sex as they choose to have, and the fawning attention of an adoring public. Those are 100% of the rewards that we can offer in America, and it’s a choice who they go to.
These are our cultural values. Popular things are treated like they’re better than necessary things, because we take necessary things for granted. Even the ads recognizing the continued employment of essential workers are still a form of taking them for granted, because they’re offering nothing. “We have a system,” they’re saying by implication. “You keep society running like you always do, and you get exactly what you always get.”
It’s not a system that’s good for anyone except people who don’t want to write big checks. Medical workers get furloughed because there aren’t enough people in the hospital, but thanks guys, we appreciate you. Grocery workers show up to work even though they’re dying, and their companies try to cut hazard pay. The rich pinch pennies, in the time-honored tradition of the rich.
This is not to argue that professional athletes at the highest level should not get all of the perks and money that they can — if they don’t take what’s theirs, it too will go to the people who own their teams, who do not need more money. But we should consider what we’re saying when we say thank you to people keeping us alive and call them flattering things without making any effort to treat them like the people we actually venerate.
So when LexCorp lets the world know that we’re all in this together, well, it’s hard not to wonder who the “we” is in that statement, because maybe it applies to MLBers or the people in Gal Godot’s Imagine video, but it sure doesn’t seem to be the people on the bottom.