”Am I invisible?”, asks the man on the side pavement of the t-train entrance.
He is new to me. At least twice a day I pass the woman who begs for money for her children’s food (she greets politely “morning” and “afternoon”), and the man in the wheelchair whose card board sign says he is a veteran (he sometimes smokes grass and the cat beside his feet seems almost unconscious in its sleep).
But this character is new. He sits beside the plastic cube of the escalator entrance in slippers and brown checked shorts. He voices despair: “Please, could you give me some money for food? I have no food, and I am really hungry”
After a considerable amount of people have passed without taking notice, he articulates the question as a sigh right out in the air in front of him:
“Am I invisible?”
With an unsettling feeling in my body I hurry towards the escalators. Behind me I have a long work day and I have no cash in my wallet.
Just as I start sliding down with the stairs I see in the corner of my eye a man in a suit who reaches out with a bill to the beggar. What a relief that somebody responded, I think as I head towards the t-train gates.
But the question remains unanswered; is the man at the pavement beside the t-train stop really invisible in the society of which he is part?
In what way is this the case and in what way is it not?
We can certainly SEE him as a beggar on the street, an image more common here in Boston than home in Helsinki.
The ways in which people are and become visible in different [welfare] systems – outside help structures and opportunities to create what we refer to as good or decent life circumstances – vary a great deal between the US and Finland.
The beggars along Mass Avenue may be visible and loud, but in the help structure system they are often non-existing and invisible.
Fixing a smart phone
That day I am in a rush home because my daughter sent a message from school saying she accidentally broke the screen on her smart phone.
I Google ”Iphone + screen reparation + Cambridge” and after some clicks I have booked some help.
At exactly 7 pm the same night there is a knock on the door.
A young man enters. He takes out a small cardboard piece that serves as a protection surface and he starts repairing my daughter’s phone at our kitchen table.
After ten minutes he is ready and the total reparation cost, including an extra protecting plastic layer, is 79 dollars.
In Helsinki, the corresponding operation costs consumers hours of queuing to different service points. The costs are the ones of the parents’ spare time or work time and the (additional) 150 euros (around 175 dollars) for a switch of glass plus the protective shield. If the work force was as cheap and as easily ‘sackable’ as in the US, maybe a person could just come around our house in Helsinki and fix the problem at our kitchen table in ten minutes?
Back to the question of who is visible and invisible in a society.
As a working producer and consumer with too little time at my hands and eager to pay myself out of problems like my children’s smart phone troubles I am definitely visible and important part of the American society.
Also, the entrepreneur who came up with the idea to make home appointments to repair the smart phones of spoiled children with busy parents is very visible. He is allowed a space of maneuver: he can realize this business idea and fulfill it on premises that gain both him and the people that want to pay for the services.
How about the repairer, the man who enters our kitchen and helps us? He is both well off and not so well off.
Some would argue that he is offered a valuable possibility — surely with a very small amount of compensation, but still — to be part of the producing end of the population.
This is an important circumstance for being a part of the American society. People that are favored and visible are those who are capable of doing, acting, consuming, producing. It is considered good to be extrovert, striving, grateful. These characteristics are encouraged in schools and universities, in the store, in the elevator in conversations with neighbors.
The prioritized values in the Finnish occupational system pertain, on their part, to employees’ protection in terms of reasonable income levels and proper work conditions. Workers’ safety and dignity are valued more than just “being in” [the work force] under any circumstance. The workers’ situation is also valued more that the high-incomers’ freedom to have their cheap and easy consumption solutions.
It is these sort of value hierarchies that dictate whose interests are prioritized, who is visible and who is allowed to live a good and decent life.
In comparison to the US system the work force logic of the small Finnish welfare state seems really stiff and difficult to manage. It is no wonder that the right wing feels it is a hopelessly outdated product of social democracy and union interests.
Giving to charity
It is not only in the street life that beggars and despair are more visible here in the US. Continuously, citizens are in their daily whereabouts made conscious of causes and people to help.
With every single restaurant or café bill the payer needs to assess the amounts of tip they want to give the personnel. In the checkout in the mall stores, costumers are asked whether they want to round up the sums of the bills to donate to cancer research or to spare time activities for incapacitated children. NGOs stand in the street corners and ask if you want to donate to work for a more democratic society; the churches in the center of the town have posters with ”Black lives matter” slogans; in the T-train 5K runs are marketed as a way of donate money to science on rare diseases.
The awareness of the underprivileged, of people who live and work under miserable conditions has a greater place in everyday life in the US in comparison to Finland. But of all people that are evidently and demonstrably injured and living in despair it is only a small fraction that is likely to be represented in my daily way to work, in my restaurant and mall visits. The choice of people that are likely to get a donation from me is not guaranteed on any principles of fairness. It is steered by likelihood, by resources of their proponents and by my own ad hoc choices and emotions. We can certainly not claim that our collective welfare state prioritization would not be to the same extent value-based. But it is not ad hoc; it is institutionalized with a wider, more equal and stable distribution.
The US system will, in comparison, always involve a greater deal of inequality. Already the criteria upon which I make up my mind regarding who to support is bound to have no valid logic whatsoever. My mom happened to die in cancer – do I feel like prioritizing help to cancer patients? Is the little girl in the wheelchair on the sticker cute enough for me to feel sorry for her? Is tonight´s waiter charming and nice enough to my family to earn his five extra dollar? (or should I save it for the war veteran’s cannabis?)
A massive hospital complex in the center of the city arranges an event with different lengths of runs for the good causes of medical research. The success may be depending on the circumstance that some high-income moms happen to spot the advertisement and decide to combine the running and donations with their monthly cheese and wine night. It certainly makes a good happening on social media!
These kind of choices are personal and individual sans any rationality of an overall view of societal needs.
But the fact that these questions need our attention and the fact that we need to deal with them is something that we are reminded about more often in the US than home in Finland. They are more visible and they directly draw on our sense of the morally right and wrong. Still, in the overall public system the man in the brown checked shorts is indeed invisible.
