Give justice a seat at our gratitude table
WASHINGTON » A friend recently turned a statement of fact into an expression of gratitude. “I work from home,” she said, “which means that I have a job and I have a place to live.”
That these basics are cause for appreciation speaks to the challenges facing so many arising from a pandemic and the economic turmoil it has let loose. The social disparities that have existed in every Thanksgiving season are more radical and more visible this year. As my friend suggested, Americans who have jobs that can be done remotely and comfortable homes to work in are far better off than many of their fellow citizens.
Consider those who have lost their jobs altogether, or those who face eviction or foreclosure. Consider the many who cannot work at home and are thus more vulnerable to the virus: from delivery people, food-processing workers and supermarket clerks to firefighters, police and sanitation workers — and of course the many trying to save lives in our medical system.
We have talked incessantly since Nov. 3 about how sharply our country is divided. But might we notice that, at least in the words we speak, we are united in our gratitude toward all those “front-line” and “essential” workers who have allowed life to go on during the pandemic — and permitted the very lucky to prosper, even in a downturn?
This is the season to ponder what gratitude means and what it requires. Is it simply a sentiment, or does it carry obligations? If we leave those obligations unfilled, is our gratitude empty?
Let’s start with the proposition that gratitude is an indispensable virtue. It is an acknowledgment that we owe our good fortune in significant part to the efforts of others who work on our behalf and to the circumstances in which we were born. Sheer, unearned good luck plays a big part in all success stories.
Gratitude is thus a close cousin to humility: It is an admission that we cannot claim that anything we have achieved was accomplished by ourselves alone. It therefore pushes against selfish forms of individualism and has “the potential of reinforcing communal ties, as philosopher Patrick Boleyn-Fitzgerald noted.
In his 1998 essay “Gratitude and Justice,” Fitzgerald argued that, properly understood, gratitude has three components: “(1) appreciation, (2) goodwill, and (3) a disposition to act in a way that flows from this appreciation and goodwill.”
It’s the third piece that we always need to work on, and the disposition to act on our gratitude can have wondrous effects if we take it seriously — on the lives of those close to us and on our nation as a whole.
We decided, for example, that it was not enough to say “thank you for your service” to the millions who joined the military in World War II. So we enacted the GI Bill that helped create the great postwar middle class. It allowed 2.2 million to attend colleges or universities and 5.6 million others to access training programs.
More than 1 million Black Americans served in a segregated military in that war. This led to inexorable pressure to desegregate the military itself and, over time, help launch the civil rights revolution. The moral obscenity of racism was brought into sharp relief when our country found itself thanking Black veterans for risking their lives for freedom — only to deny them that very freedom (including, across the South, the right to vote) when they came home.
We need to apply these lessons to the workers whose contributions we long ignored but whom we now honor as “essential.” My Brookings Institution colleague Molly Kinder has focused on the situation of these Americans from the beginning of the pandemic. She noted in a report last month that covid-19 “has laid bare the wide gap between the low wages that frontline workers earn and the essential value they bring to society.”
She’s right that “it is a moral outrage that low-wage essential workers are risking their lives — and their families’ lives — for wages that do not even provide them the basic dignity of a family- sustaining wage.”
This is more than a political question. It is a moral problem that should engage us during this Pandemic Thanksgiving.
In his Thanksgiving proclamation in 1863 during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln urged citizens to “fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it.”
In our era, let’s acknowledge the wounds of social injustice. We can express our “appreciation and goodwill” by committing ourselves to healing them.
Gratitude is thus a close cousin to humility: It is an admission that we cannot claim that anything we have achieved was accomplished by ourselves alone. It therefore pushes against selfish forms of individualism and has ‘the potential of reinforcing communal ties,’ as philosopher Patrick BoleynFitzgerald noted.