By Chris Satullo

Don’t know about you, but these days I live in a state of perpetual, quiet rage.

So this week, I’m going to drop the habits of cool analysis and civil tongue I usually try to maintain in this space. I’m going to vent, to tell some people – the ones who think a few easy gestures wash away a pile of sins – just what I think of them.

We’ve all seen, and many of us have joined, one of Pandemic World’s swiftly established rituals: the public thanking and praising of the workers who daily risk infection to battle the virus or to keep our communities fed and functioning. These folks deserve every cheer, clap, banged pot, heart-tugging ad and flowery Facebook post that’s sent their way:

• The hospital staffs, not just the doctors, but the fabulous nurses who (God bless and protect them) confront the virus and the risk, the grief and the trauma, most intensely each day. Plus the social workers, the lab techs and – please don’t forget these – the environmental staffers. The latter also risk their lives, for less pay and fewer shout-outs. (Someone has to cart off all that used PPE and infectious waste each day.)

• The supermarket workers and restaurant staffers who keep us fed, while often enduring the dangerous selfishness of the mask-less and the rudeness of those who just have to let out some of that quarantine stress.

• The bus drivers who sit in a hot zone all day so that some of these other workers can make it to the frontlines.

And many more. I apologize for not citing you all, for not doing all I might to support you.

My rage is not directed at you; it is on your behalf.

The current vogue for showy gratitude is reminiscent of the Iraq war years. No matter what we personally thought of that grievous error, most of us went out of our way to thank and offer respect to those who served. Justly so. That habit lingers in rituals like the fifth-inning honors for active duty personnel at major league games. They’re trotted out onto the field in their camo or dress blues, handed third base, shown on the Jumbotron as everyone stands and cheers. Me included. But at these moments, two questions worm their way into my brain:

1) Why do we never invite a nurse, teacher, a firefighter, or a social worker out onto the diamond to “thank them for their service”? As COVID-19 has led us to recognize at long last, they also do stressful, underpaid work on behalf of the rest of us, who could never do what they do.

2) How many of these fans standing and clapping near me, beaming as they congratulate themselves for their gratitude, will, the minute they get home, resume complaining about the very federal taxes that pay for this warrior’s service and the benefits he or she will be due as a veteran?

That is my problem with some of the praise for the nurse, the grocery clerk and the bus driver. It is tainted by bad faith.

If you’re someone who votes for the politicians who have systematically underfunded and undermined the Affordable Care Act, who put a fiscal knife to the throat of Medicare while pretending to “protect” it, who pocket Big Pharma’s campaign cash then look the other way as it scarfs up health care dollars that should go elsewhere, then spare us your odes to the nurses. They are hollow. You are complicit in a system that has overworked, underpaid and exploited them for years.

If you are an employer who tries to bust unions, who denies workers benefits and decent pay under the fiction that they’re “independent contractors,” who hires and mistreats undocumented workers then votes to build The Wall, who applies for the Payroll Protection Program then tries to keep all the money for your own use, then let those cheers die in your throat. They would foul the air. You are complicit in a system that has overworked, underpaid and exploited supermarket clerks, fast-food workers and restaurant servers for years.

If you’re a taxpayer who shouts Yeah! when lawmakers carry on about deficits and peddle hyped rants about “waste” in programs that help the masses, then shrugs when the same pols enact deficit-swelling tax cuts and loopholes to benefit their affluent donors…

Or one who nods when Mitch McConnell suggests we should stiff the state and local governments that must fight the pandemic as the White House fiddles…

Please put down that saucepan. We don’t need your pot-banging. It sounds tinny.

You are complicit in a system that for decades has indulged a geographic theft of tax dollars that robs the big-city bus driver, teacher, EMT and police officer both of pay and the tools to do their jobs. (And now McConnell proposes to raid their pensions, too.)

Actions have consequences. Responsibility sticks.

Back in the 80’s, Ronald Reagan brilliantly deployed eloquence, anecdote and actor’s craft to sell millions of regular Americans on a bullshit narrative about what government is and does,  versus what capital is and does. 

Ever since, we’ve been recklessly eroding the capacity of our government – our government, the expression of our collective ideals and values – to rise to the grievous challenges we now confront in this pandemic. We’ve been mistreating and ill-equipping precisely those quiet, working-class heroes whom we most need in this terrifying moment.

So, yes, they deserve every ovation, every ad, every kind gesture they get. But they also deserve health coverage, decent pay and a chance to educate themselves without taking on crushing debt. And, yeah, this’d mean you might have to pay a bit more at checkout and on April 15. Deal with it.

Please…if you’ve subscribed to the trickle-down, government-is-the-problem narrative, don’t suppose that a little hand-clapping absolves you of your role in decades of policy that betrayed these workers and set America up for this disaster.

Cheap cheers won’t begin to exonerate you. Only your vote in November can.

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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia.