#heroism

Apparently in Saudi Arabia, the epidemic has had a profound social effect. Many of the migrant workers who supplied the country with its cheap labor have returned to their homelands, and thus created an opportunity, or the necessity, for Saudi women to join the workforce, as they have now done in unprecedented numbers.

A third of Saudi women are now either working or seeking work, an increase of 60 percent in only a year or two, a veritable silent revolution.

It is not surprising in the circumstances that they are paid far less than men—their jobs are mostly in the poorly paid sectors—but they earn far more than the migrant workers whom they have replaced. Whether the migrant workers will return when the epidemic is over is an open question: Will the women simply accept to return to their sequestered lives as before, and will the Saudi government wish to continue to economize on its balance of payments consequent upon the replacement of foreigners by Saudis? As for the effect on the countries that export their cheap labor in return for remittances, what will it be?

On a visit to the Gulf a few years ago, I bought a tanzanite ring for my wife. The server in the shop did not own it; he was a migrant laborer, allowed home two weeks every two years. For the rest of the time, he worked 72 hours a week, and lived and slept in a dormitory. He could not have been from the very poorest section of Indian society because he spoke quite good English. His salary was meager, and what he earned in a month I was prepared to spend in a minute without a moment’s reflection. Nevertheless, he was saving money so that he could marry back home, and in another few years would be able to do so.

In the most obvious sense, he was exploited. His employer took advantage of his poverty to extract a large amount of labor from him for little return. And yet he did not strike me as miserable (of course, he could have been acting) or self-pitying. As he himself said, he had made a choice, he had not been press-ganged, and he had come to the conclusion that he was better off accepting the offered conditions than anything else that was available to him. Would Covid-19 and its economic consequences have forced him home?

I would prefer a world in which a man such as he did not have to make the choice that he had had to make, to sacrifice himself for years in order to achieve what comes so easily to many others. But such as he play their part—a tiny part, but a part nonetheless—in improving the world. I found him heroic. Like all true heroes, he was unaware of his heroism.

- Theodore Dalrymple

“Choosing to live is an act of defiance, a form of heroism.”

Lale, The Tattooist of Auschwitz

Now, obviously, stabbing simone repeatedly in the chest and facebook are two very different things. However, both Julius Cæsar’s death and Kanye West’s social media do prove heroism in the end.

Colon had always thought that heroes had some special kind of clockwork that made them go out and die famously for god, country and apple pie, or whatever particular delicacy their mother made. It had never occurred to him that they might do it because they’d get yelled at if they didn’t.

Terry Pratchett, Jingo