Living at the university, we see them every day.
They're in the hallways, sweeping the walks, as we stumble out of bed to our 8:00 classes - they've been up since 4:00.
They're at the doorways when we return, standing on ladders or sitting behind counters, managing our safety by fixing a broken fire door, checking an ID, making sure we're not trapped by flames or followed by strangers. Who keeps an eye on their safety, as they enter apartments late at night, walk up ladder-steep stairs, crouch down to tinker with the heating system that keeps breaking, wondering if that's the night it'll burst into flames or freeze?
They're in the front or the back of the dining hall, placing out trays and greeting crowds, collecting the dishes and arranging the rolls. As we wind our way between fellow students and their backpacks, they navigate the twisting routes of teenagers, acting as so many mothers, grandparents, uncles, focusing their energy on the younger generation only, providing for them while staying out of their way. They smile companionably as we say we're "starving;" they eat only after we're done.
They're our mothers, grandparents, uncles, elders, as they've been and as we've wanted them to be - self-sacrificing for us, the generation after. Only we're not their children - and as they serve us - because they do, they serve us, us who haven't deserved it - are they forced to neglect their own?
These people, the older-aged, lower-class employees of the university - they work menial jobs, they make minimum wage. They are surrounded, every day, by a generation that has passed them by, a generation who experience daily a life saturated with new opportunities that they didn't have. They pass posters in the halls inviting us to attend a lecture on career preparation, an information meeting on graduate school, a concert that costs us $15, that would cost them $50, who can far less afford it. They see us on our way to and out of classes that prepare us to become doctors, psychologists, scientists, professors - and they pave our paths there. I've often wondered how they do it, and how I should feel. Do I admire them, pity them (terrible word!), revere them, ignore them? It's hard to know how to respond. Here we are, being taught the American Dream as we live it, troubled with our own problems but still inundated with more opportunities than even the most ambitious can grasp, invited every day to the American discourse, the American workforce, the American upwards course. But here they are, laden with their own problems and inundated with evidences of class division, inducted early into the shadows and margins of the American Dream as we live it - we and not they.
Why?
I'm all for introducing the young to opportunity - I'm one of them, after all - and I think we're being helped more today than ever before. There's a ways to go, of course, but so many of us do have the opportunities we never did before, that we longed for, that our parents and grandparents longed for us to have. And now we do. But what about them? Here in America, we worship youth and beauty, we kneel at the shrines of promise and nod approvingly at displays of ambition. And those are admirable. But they were young once too, and they had ambition and promise, and somehow they missed the chances we've received.
They are flourishingly fluent - in other languages, in a multiplicity of cultures, in the past and in the present, in wisdom and molding experience, in the patina of life that comes with age and a life lived unbroadcasted, untracked but just as real. They are our elders, they have experienced more and learned more and lived more than we, but somehow our small resumes of promise outweigh their full records of production and perseverance. Is it fair? And what can we do?
This problem of unequal status and recognition of unique lives goes way further than my campus - but right now, I don't know how to work on it any further than here. And what can I do here? I work in their jobs, too - as a student paying for my education mostly on my own, I've had the chance to experience a bit of both lives - the privileged middle-class and the struggling under-class, and the shades in between. I've gone to thousand-dollar classes in a million-dollar building and then, after an hour, went around the back of the same building to wash dishes and file papers and clean up trash in the bins behind the columns. I'm in honors and leadership and dean's list and future teachers and research conferences, and I'm in hourly pay and low wages and rush hour at work, but the thing is, I have both. I experience both. It's a tricky position to be in, but it's made me aware both that I'm privileged, and that there are so many others, working right by me, who aren't. I look up to them and admire them, and then I go to prepare for a career that will make thousands of dollars more than theirs, that will buy me a house far from them and a view that no longer looks in at their windows. And I'm wondering why - if I can have class mobility and some opportunities showering in my lap and other opportunities grasped at and caught, why can't they? What happened that they were denied? And can they have the chance again?
I don't know what should be done, don't even know how much I don't know about the situation - but the first step I see is providing access. I think the university's classes and lectures and cultural events should be offered to all - to its employees, especially, because they can appreciate them most. Maybe it could offer a discount on classes towards a degree that they didn't have the opportunity to finish earlier in their life because of family responsibilities or money problems or something else; maybe they could have a movement for higher pay. I'm not sure what, exactly - but the university, the students, we, should give something back to them, after all they've given us. They should have more opportunities - they deserve them as much as we do - and they're already here, waiting. For respect, for dignity, for more rewards of their full-lived lives. They're talented, experienced, world-wise, ready to rise. Let's rise with them, not above them, and let's appreciate. Like Arthur Miller said in "Death of A Salesman," "Attention must be paid." We can never pay back all they've done for us - but we can pay attention.
Let's start now.
Very good blog entry! I've thought about this too, perhaps not in the same light as you. I often wonder about the lives of the employees in the university. They see us complaining as we walk to an early class, while they're up even earlier to clean out the toilets! It feels like a great unjustice.
I also like the addition of a Death of a Salesman quote. I didn't really like the play, but that quote is definitly a redeeming point of it.