Editor’s note: This commentary is by Nick Santoro, of Rutland, who spent 40 years carving stone sculptures until a back operation mostly sidelined that career. He has worked on the community action videos “Gardens Grow Community” and “Baxter Street Alley”.
This present spurious government shutdown provides many opportunities for spiritual insight, political action and a chance to know that other’s pain could easily be your own at any moment in our explosive time.
Many people in this community and around our country are commiserating with the suffering of unpaid federal employees. This unilateral political decision and its tentacled impact, offer us possibility to expand our humanity with compassion for all people undergoing unanticipated misfortune. It is an opportunity to try to understand that the carved words at the top of the Marble Bank in downtown Rutland, “VICTORY TO THE INDIVIDUAL OVER THE ODDS THAT BESET HIM.” Implying that each of us is responsible for all that happens in our lives is a great ideal, but a notion of great simplicity that falls far short of the social complexities of living in a complicated civilization, aka, the present shutdown hostage situation.
It is easy to feel for this group of working people deprived of their livelihoods. Federal workers have variable wages, but benefits and pensions make these jobs desirable. Many of these working people have middle-class lifestyles with a sense of security that has been snatched from them through “the art of the deal.”
The high employment figures you read about in the papers are not anything like federal jobs. Most jobs these days provide none of the middle-class access to a comfortable lifestyle because pay is not nearly commensurate with the costs of living, benefits are paltry and these jobs mean buying your own health insurance that is not affordable, and serve to put people further into debt peonage. Often, not working is preferable to this situation.
The point I’m making is that most people want jobs that provide security and a capacity to pay bills. Federal jobs do. Adversity comes in secure packages too. Any of us can be felled at any time. We sort of travel on the same ship, except for the millionaires and billionaires who’d rather create a modern day Versailles oblivion, or go to Mars, than pay a worker a living wage. As much as American exceptionalism, individualism and our digital lifestyles make us atomized entities, each one of us IS part of this greater complex whole in our slippery, sliding downward democracy. To feel compassion for these federal working people is normal humanness. They have been caught in the net of bully approbation. To feel and act on behalf of living wages for working people is a spiritual, political and compassionate act of humanity and certainly would provide the buoyancy for our unevenly distributed wobbling democratic ship.
