someone

I have been reading the excellent Know Your Place: Essays on the Working Class By The Working Class (Dead Ink Press) and finished reading it tonight. Why would a middle-class American (is that still a thing?) be reading essays about being working class in Great Britain? Many reasons, not least of which is that it is excellent --pretty sure I mentioned that.

One of the essays, a piece called "Glass Windows and Glass Ceilings" by a writer called Wally Jiagoo, struck me. All of the essays struck me, but Mr. Jiagoo's essay struck me on a personal level and ended on a note that spoke very powerfully about the way things are going in the world -- and miracle of miracles, offers a solution.

Mr. Jiagoo has worked as a Housing Benefit Officer in South London and also as a screenwriter, and his essay captures both worlds well with spot-on dialogue and insight. As a screenwriter from a working class background, he experiences the frustration of being someone who has "quite the knack for writing orrrdinary people" (code for someone who has difficulty networking and finding work because everyone else in that world seems to already know everyone else through family or school connections). As a Housing Benefit Officer, he is responsible for delivering benefit caps to frustrated people from behind a glass window "for [his] protection".

The world Mr. Jiagoo writes about --and the world we live in --is full of gatekeepers. You can come in, but you can't. We can help you, but you, we can't.

At some point, we gatekeepers (and I include myself in this group) need to realize that the gates are there. They are very real, and they are built of strong stuff. Why are they there? Tradition? Legal mumbo jumbo? Our own comfort? Fear? Who knows? But they are most definitely there, and we keep them tightly shut.

Mr. Jiagoo's solution: "It's not within our remit that we help ..., so we've just accepted that we can't ...but we can."

It is incumbent on all of us to remember: sometimes, we are that someone who should do something. We can grumble about how unfair things are, or we can begin to do something about it --one person at a time, one situation at a time, one day at a time. It might not be in our remit, but those of us who understand how the gate works need to guide and support those who don't as they navigate its complexities. It is a very lonely place to be, on the outside of a gate looking in.

"See," Mr. Jiagoo says, "in the world I'm trying to enter, I'm waiting on someone to let me pass. But in this world ...I'm that someone." 

We each have places in our lives where we can be that someone. Look for those gates.