Dear America,
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The three comments to which I refer were an editorial from the staff of The Times itself, a letter to those editors from a Tennessee woman, and a brief, innocuous comment from David Brooks, a noted essayist and thinker. The editorial was on a different subject: Jim Crow laws, arguing that Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act is still necessary because the vestiges of segregation persist in this country, and the states still need oversight if they are to be kept from reversing the gains they have made at the polls through new, restrictive voter registration laws. The comment from the Tennessee woman had a chilling irony to it in what the woman saw fit to defend in the American worker. The articles previously mentioned had pointed out that the manufacturing facilities of the companies doing Apple's bidding included dormitory facilities for as many as 3,000 workers, necessary so that they could stay on the job working what we would regard as double shifts and doing so sometimes seven days a week, with the resulting personal distress of the workers sometimes leading to suicide. She was reacting to a comment by a former supply/demand manager at Apple recounted in The Times in which she said, "What U.S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms." Apparently at Apple, that kind of demand on workers is a capitalistic coup, but the woman did not make the point that we had just spent a century remedying that kind of abuse of the working person. No, her complaint was that indeed there are people in this country who would live to produce I-Phones, abandoning their lives to do so. They are veterans, immigrants, homeless people and recent high school graduates who are discovering that they will not be able to live their parents' lives. Her point was that we can be more Chinese if Apple will just let us. And the third comment was from Brooks in his bi-weekly op-ed piece. It was about the need for change...not incremental change, but dramatic change. He said that staffers in The White House had said that, "[T]o compete with China, we only need to shift the playing field a bit," a criticism of President Obama's "cautious tendencies."
My point is that instead of reveling in the evolution of social justice in this country and dedicating ourselves to defending it, we seem to be lapsing into the mentality that in order to defend the amoral, we only need to pare down some of our morals. We can build dormitories for workers so that they can be housed for months at a time between weekend visits with their spouses and children. Never mind the righteous claim of the Evangelical Right that we need more family time and better family values, including two parents in the home. And we have people so starved for employment that they will work for less than a living wage because those at the top have tee times to make and Mercedes payments due at the end of the month. We can put our sixteen year olds to work, either in those dorms or as janitors in the schools as Newt Gingrich wants to do, and reverse a century of enlightenment that staunched the use of children as industrial fodder so as to allow them to go on to reasonable adult lives. If all of our progress toward civilization is dispensable, we can go to the lengths decried by the Times' editorial staff and forgo voting rights and opposition to Jim Crow laws. We can just go back to slavery and add children to the indentured class. That would be really capitalistic. You know, if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing all the way
.Your friend,
Mike
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