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The plight of low-income people is invisible to mainstream society. They live in segregated neighborhoods, take on thankless jobs, go unnoticed even though they are in plain view, and enter through side and back doors of hotels, or more correctly, through servants’ entrances. I went to Wal-Mart the other day and was handed a receipt that read across the top: “I’m Amna. I’m happy to serve you.” It continued on the next line: “with our service basics.” As it appeared to me, a person in more control than Amna at this corporation decided that Amna should hand this message out on every one of her receipts. What would make someone earning a good enough salary think that this was a good idea? We’re not even told what those service basics are and as it appeared to me, they didn’t really matter. What mattered was that this woman was so easily misused to make the consumer culture function and the American Dream so real. I, as a consumer, am for a moment empowered with someone to “serve me.”Standing at the cashier, it wasn’t Amna’s situation alone that troubled me. I thought about those who are willing to fight and die in the War on Iraq, those who enlist in the army to earn money for college, those who wouldn’t have been caught dead joining the armed forces, those who do not share in the American Deam but sweat out unappreciated labor to make it a reality, those who work two, three, or four jobs and try to find their lives in between, perhaps an education, and those who simply die used up and exhausted. I thought about my obligation to make at least one of them visible.
