I’m a pretty cheerful guy.  Ask any of my coworkers, and they’ll tell you that I can be relied upon to surprise customers with a clever observation, an unexpected, probing question, or a joke to tantalize them on an otherwise mundane day.

So I was surprised yesterday that a couple of customers shot back the same irritated platitude when I casually mentioned that I had been at work all day.  It happened between 6 and 7 P.M.  Both customers were buying copious amounts of groceries at the time.  Their response: “Well, you should be grateful that you have a job!”

I thought about that.  I thought long and hard as I ran one item through my checkstand after another, and I became more and more bothered by it.  I should be grateful?  Grateful to whom? I felt appropriately grateful to God for my not being another victim of this last year’s broadly-felt misfortune, but I don’t think that’s what those customers meant.

I think they meant that I should be grateful to my employer or the economy, or just grateful in my general attitude.  Contemplating this angered me.  Yes, I was grateful; I was grateful in the same way that a man in 64 AD might be when his house was spared as Rome burned; I was grateful like an Irish farmer in 1850 who had survived the blight; I was grateful like the women who didn’t get raped the night Kitty Genovese was left to her own devices.

I was grateful, but not to a person.  My continued employment wasn’t the product of sacrifice, intent, or altruism.  It retained all of its original transactional nature–I benefited, my employer benefited more.  I was simply lucky that I hadn’t fallen through the severely insufficient safety net yet, but no one was going to stop me from falling if my time came.  I could be grateful to fate, but not to a man-made economic system which, despite capability to do otherwise, would deny me help as my house burned, refuse me food if I was starving, let me die a horrid death, or allow me to lose my job and all that I had if it was too much of an imposition to assist me.  And I couldn’t be grateful to any of the men who profited from that system’s ignorance or obstinance, or from an obsession with preserving their own choices at the expense of the choices of countless others.

Later in the night, after I had considered these events, a couple came through my line and purchased some fresh fruit using a $10 WIC check.  I asked them their opinion of my situation, telling them what I’ve just told you.  The man looked very tired.  He replied, barely above the beeping of the scanner, “Seems like you’ve got a solid argument to me.”  The rest of their visit passed in silence.  I felt validated somewhat, but still dissatisfied.

Different groups would look at his response in very different ways.  The “personal responsibility” crowd would probably assume that the WIC recipient’s husband was unemployed and not seeking employment, and simply wanted validation for the bitterness he felt toward a condition he had willingly chosen.  Another might guess that he’s a hard but struggling worker, perhaps more intimately connected with both my plight and with the concept of social safety nets (being protected by one, himself), and value his perspective.

Who knows.  All I know is that there’s a WIC recipient out there who’s scraping by because of a social safety net; there are millions of people who’ve never thought about what they’re grateful for, and how much more grateful they could be; and there are thousands of people who don’t have jobs even while fields lay fallow and factories wallow in their own rust.

Because economy has become secondary to humanity, our society has progressed so that the fears of fire and famine are generally assuaged.  When a house burns, firemen arrive.  When a potato blight is discovered, the farm is quarantined and disinfected.  When a crime is in progress, citizens, thankfully, alert the police.  We collectively take these responsbilities on our shoulders despite the imposition, and I’ll always be grateful to a responsive society for that.  For other things, I can’t be grateful yet, except through my gratitude for the potential of a distant future.

I’m grateful that we have the power to make society worthy of our gratitude.  We can improve our social safety net and devote more social resources to the empowerment of the individual, and I can be a part of that.  It’s a kind of gratitude that requires work to make it genuine, but that makes it all the more gratifying.  So, for the present, I hope you, like me, are grateful to chance that it sometimes passes you by.  For the chance to craft a future of sought possibilities and more purely deserved rewards, when most people can push ill fortune to the fringe of probability, you should be truly grateful, too.