Ahsen Jillani
By Ahsen Jillani
The other day my daughter sent me a dinner food delivery. By the time I saw her text message that it was at the front door, raccoons had eaten it. What surprised me most was that the delivery was just in a fast-food type cardboard box. What the raccoons didn’t eat was full of ants. I have discussed over the years that we may exclusively be a service industry now. Maybe we are nothing.
Maybe we all want to manage Chinese labor now. Even pre-pandemic, I was starting to see cracks in how America defined its economy. The roofing guy would charge me hundreds, and the roof would leak the same during the next storm. The A/C guy would sign me up for a quarterly maintenance contract and not show up at all. The tree cutting guys would leave 2,000 pounds of stumps in the back yard and disappear in their rusted pickup truck because it was too hot a day.
During the pandemic, I would think I was generous to people who were working the front lines and keeping me alive and feeling normal. If I got a $6 chicken sandwich, I sometimes gave the drive thru workers a $20 tip. But the order was usually wrong anyway, like it was usually wrong before the virus hit. I am now puzzled about where we are really going.
During the Reagan presidency, the Made in the USA stickers became a thing. Chrysler/Dodge and indeed most American automobile manufacturers were making almost garbage cars. I know because I owned two. They were ugly and uninspired designs with horrible engines and transmissions. But we were all trying to salvage Detroit CEOs and the auto industry stockholders by driving around in cars that overheated and rattled just going across town.
So today, we have grown up and moved on to Make America Great Again. We blast the Chinese everywhere from the White House to the local pub, and fly American flags on our Harley Davidsons that have a distinct Made in China sticker on them. Other than agricultural products and a few car components, we are hardly manufacturing much of anything. If China suddenly stopped exporting to the US, Amazon would probably collapse in a few weeks.
This xenophobic patriotism has become the hallmark of administrations on both sides of the isle in the last four decades. We want Americans to pick up their lunch boxes, prepared by beautiful and smiling wives, and leave for work to make us great again. The problem is that that was probably a public relations sexist fantasy to begin with. Few people came home to well-behaved kids in ironed clothes and a roast in the oven.
We were all just working. Like the rest of the planet, we were all just working — with the problems associated with managing bills and lives. Women managed the US economy through WW-II. They weren’t walking around in aprons making potatoes. They were assembling aircraft. The global spread of autocracy and the yearn to return to the “ye ole days” have also added fuel to the fire of sexism and racism.
I have often debated not only here but with numerous political operatives about immigration over the years. America is under some delusion that the average citizen here wants to harvest grapes or strawberries or lettuce on 12 hour shifts with a 15-minute lunch break. Or they want to stand in slaughterhouses full of blood and guts at their feet. The pandemic has shown us an epidemic of Help Wanted signs as well. We salvaged corporate stocks by giving stimulus checks to the country, but never really gave employees a solution to what ails us. But the problem may be more far reaching.
I worked blue color jobs for a quarter century after leaving a great job as an editor. I noticed early those wages remained stagnant during my entire experience in the printing industry. Bosses living in multi-million-dollar homes would give out $25 gift cards as annual bonuses at holiday parties. They always pretended to be broke. Employee morale was zero. People were sluggish on the best of days.
Post-pandemic, I feel like the entire economy and workforce is sluggish. If I had an answer, I would be in Washington with a high paying job advising the economists. This is more of an existential crisis now. We can’t all be managers of course. But we also don’t take pride in working with our hands and crafting something. We don’t see a certain model car and say, “I made the alternators for that one.” We don’t see a label on lumber and say, “That seal is from my company.”
So, seeing the collapse of the service industry as well is making me really nervous. The mailman tossing mail on my grass because the trash guys were in too much hurry and threw the trash cans in front of the mailbox. The delivery drivers leaving boxes in the rain when there is a clear sign on my door to deliver to back porch in case of bad weather. All this matters.
All this is about pride. I do most of my housework myself. I take pride in how well I mop the floors or clean the kitchen. I take time to cook healthy meals for when the kids visit. I take pride in how I cut the grass or clean the windows. I take pride in how well I do my laundry. I then take pride in doing PR work for clients. I have worked those jobs in my life. As one of my bosses used to say, “When you are on my clock, you will clean toilets if I want you to.” It used to tick me off at the time because I was a former newspaper editor. I am always on my own clock. Housework earns me no money, but maybe we need to again learn to proudly clean toilets.
Ahsen Jillani is a former editor and publisher, is originally from Islamabad, Pakistan, and now lives in Mint Hill, NC. He owns Must Media, a PR firm focused on political and corporate clients. Contact: aj@must-media.com
