Blue-Collar Pandemic
by Anthony Arnold
June 2020
As we slowly, haltingly, begin moving away from the pandemic, the retrospectives have begun. Media members, channeling the feelings and experiences of the white collar professionals that make up their social groups, have started emerging from their self-imposed exiles. And as they’ve started doing that, they’ve been celebrating their new found freedom. This general viewpoint, of a pandemic that has been survived from the inside of a bunker, has been the dominant one for over the last year.
Except that perspective isn’t the only one. For many Americans, the pandemic has been an experience in which their personal freedom was limited, for good reasons. But their work obligations have continued like normal. Early on there was talk about limiting in-person work only to those who were considered “essential.” But what became quickly apparent was that not only were many people performing non-critical work somehow considered essential, but that there was really no way to enforce any of the rules anyway.
And so people just kept working. They kept going off, everyday, to jobs that were probably unsafe. They kept performing largely unimportant tasks, making money as usual, while being told it was “too unsafe” to be moving around. They worked, like normal, only to leave work and be told there was nothing to do other than go home. There was, and remains, a real disconnect between people who were able to work from home, and people who were not.
Early on during this pandemic, I wrote a piece expressing my frustration at the reality that this viewpoint wasn’t being seen. So it’s been maddening to see that nearly a year later there’s been no progress on that front. If anything it’s only gotten worse.
There are consequences to this blindness. The job of the media is primarily two-fold. Their first obligation is to “speak truth to power”; and I’ll leave you to judge whether or not you believe they’re doing an adequate job of that. The second is to help people gain a better understanding of the world. On that front, the last year has been an abject failure.
Television anchors have dialed in to their shows, discussing the pandemic from the comfort of a plushly accommodated home office. They’ve converted spare closets and spacious downstairs living areas into makeshift home studios, complete with sound proofing and professional grade microphones. Columnists have written about the pandemic with the tone and urgency of a man behind bars, gazing wistfully at the outside world, fervently looking forward to the day when they could once again step outside.
But, what does this experience mean to the rest of us? What does it mean to the person working at Target, who spent the pandemic behind a cash register, hoping the next person in line would be wearing a mask? What does it mean to the Amazon worker, who has found the last year to be busier than ever?
Or the truck driver, who has been delivering goods like normal, stopping at the gas stations that dot the map across America? Or the police officer, who’s very job involves interacting with others?
The experiences of a comfortable elite are not the experiences that most of us have had. But by failing to understand what we’ve gone through, those same elite have fundamentally misjudged why some of us have responded the way we have.
For many people, their frustration with the restrictions and rules has come from a place of legitimate anger, not simply a desire to “reject science.” Because it’s incredibly frustrating to be expected to produce and labor like normal, while being told that you can’t enjoy the fruits of that labor. It’s frustrating to watch your boss sit at home, while you are told that you have no choice, but to come to work. There’s something deeply unfair about that, and it doesn’t make you a monster for acknowledging that.
But where has that perspective been in our media? Why have they been so slow to realize that the way they have lived the last year is extremely out of touch with how most of us have done so?
Those questions lie at the heart of many of our problems, now. The media that most of us consume, myself included, is not actually meant for us. If you consider yourself one of the “average people,” then sources like the New York Times, CNN, or Fox News aren’t actually for you. They’re places where elites talk to other elites, for the pleasure of an elite class.
That’s a harsh thing to say of course, and it’s probably a bit unfair. But I don’t think it’s too far off the mark. The issue here is that those sorts of places were never supposed to be for us. That was the job of local papers, who had a vested interest in embedding themselves in local communities and trying to get the whole story. The New York Times, with all of its resources, has very little interest in finding out what’s happening in Indianapolis, unless we somehow become a national story.
During normal times, that’s probably not much of a problem. But during the last year, that tendency has meant that the impact and experience of the pandemic that most of us have lived through has been absent from the conversation. So now, as people celebrate a “return to normal,” we’re missing once again.
For a lot of people, the last year has been a series of impositions placed on us from above. Our kids haven’t been able to attend school. We haven’t been able to attend church, or gather in our normal social groups. We’ve been told to stay put, because there was a disease ravaging the land, and anything else was simply unsafe.
But those are things that were done to us, not things that we agreed to. And the warnings weren’t in line with the fact that we had jobs to do, and bills to pay.
Of course, there’s a much larger question here: Has the media failed completely?
To that, I say no. For all my criticisms of them, I do believe they serve a useful purpose. There is no better way to be informed about the day-to-day happenings across this country than to read the headlines of one of our big national papers. It still is the quickest way to being an informed citizen, and it’s a practice I would recommend to anybody.
That being said, there really is a large disconnect in these places. They don’t have much to say about my world, and I suspect they don’t have much to say about the world that most of us inhabit. Which means that in moments of true crisis, they won’t be of much use to us.
In elite circles, there’s a lot of talk about diversity now. But that diversity, while well-intentioned, is typically limited to race and gender. Perhaps sexual orientation. Those are laudable goals, and I certainly don’t want to suggest otherwise. But diversity isn’t just about those categories.
There’s diversity of geography, religion, age, income level, educational level, and political view -- and of course my list is hardly an exhaustive one. Measured by a truly comprehensive view of diversity, I suspect many places would find themselves much less accommodating than they believe.
But without true diversity, across all possible spectrums, how can our media ever really reflect us? How can it identify our experiences, and turn those experiences into narratives and stories that create shared understanding? It probably can’t.
As we put this last year and change behind us, it’s worth remembering the lessons we’ve learned; about the delicate balance between safety and freedom; about the opportunistic approaches of some politicians, who have been all too eager to turn tragedy into triumph; about the necessity of building communal bonds that amplify and support us when we need it the most.
But let’s not forget that the voices we most often hear speaking, quite often are not speaking for us at all.