My young friends told me the same story as the novelist: People don’t see them when they’re behind the counter. They might greet the customer by name, and he’d looked confused or even annoyed, till something in his brain would click, and he realized he was speaking to someone he knew. They were the help, and invisible.
Writing novels not paying the bills, Camilla Grudova worked as a server at the same arts center where her own book had been launched, and she’d been a celebrity. People she knew “would disdainfully ‘shoo shoo’ me away with my tray whenever I offered them more hors d’oeuvres. It can be like skipping from one reality to another, as if the attendees have changed masks, from friendly to ghoulish.”
When so many people in our national life flaunt their cruelty and their enjoyment of the pain they’re causing other people, almost always (of course) the vulnerable and marginalized, we need to do better than them. We can’t stop them on our own, but we can retard their degradation of our national character by doing what they refuse to do.
That includes treating “the help” — fast food workers, servers in restaurants, cashiers in stores, delivery people, all the people so many people don’t notice — as human beings as important as yourself.
Part of the faceless mob