Philosophy Of Right: Hegel In The 21st Century

Philosophy Of Right: Hegel In The 21st Century

BY CHRISTOPHER HORNER 3 Quarks Daily

Among the books of the nineteenth century that have something important to say to us now Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820) deserves a prominent place. It’s not the obvious contender for a popular read in the 21st century. He doesn’t make it easy for himself, if getting readers was the aim as his ‘grotesque and rocky melody’ (Marx) takes some getting used to, and one has to work a bit to to grasp his arguments. So its not a surprise that is more written about than actually read. This is a pity, as it is right up there with Plato’s Republic and Hobbes’ Leviathan as one of the great works of ethical and political philosophy, with arguably even more direct and relevant things to tell us about our society than those other two classics. It’s a text that has been seriously misunderstood and misrepresented – most notoriously by those who represent him as having announced ‘the end of history’. It is true that something, for Hegel, is coming to an end in our time, but it isn’t exactly history. Hegel gives us an acute and pressingly relevant diagnosis of both the promise of modernity, and the contradictions that threaten it. Citizens in the age of Trump, Johnson, Xi Jinping and Biden would do well to attend to what he has to say in these pages.

It is a troubling text for liberals, not because it is anti liberal in the sense of being opposed to the values liberals hold dear (dignity of the individual, freedom of conscience, rights and so on) but rather because its author regards the insights of liberals as dangerously limited. Liberalism, with its focus on the freedom of the individual, sees the function of the state as guarantor of the freedom of the individual, in the context of a civil society and free market. But for Hegel, genuine freedom means more than this.

He argues that there must be an orientation on the part of citizens to those institutions that ground the freedom of the individual in an objective order – an ethical life that requires more of the state than the role of external guarantor of negative freedom (the freedom to do as one wishes, provided one does not impinge on the freedom of others). Citizens should understand themselves as having a place in that order, as the site in which they may truly actualise their freedom, which is not conceived abstractly, but rather as situated at a point in history. A certain self-understanding that can recognise and reflectively endorse works of the ‘spirit’ embodied in institutions and in an ethical life, one that is a necessary condition for freedom: ‘the habit of the ethical appears as second nature’.

The text has intimations of the profound, perhaps insoluble, problems that any liberal state, based on a market economy, faces. These problems can be seen as arising not accidentally or contingently, but necessarily from the features of the state that Hegel describes. On this account, states and institutions are prone to change, and this change arises from the kinds of contradictions generated by the working of the very civil society that makes them distinctive: the accumulation of wealth in a capitalist economy also generating inequality and poverty. It is possible to grasp what has been happening, subject to the limitations that one’s perspective is bound to have. Philosophy is ‘its time held in thought’, as Hegel writes in the preface :

As far as the individual is concerned, each individual is in any case, a child of his time; thus philosophy too is its own time comprehended in thoughts. It is just as foolish to imagine that any philosophy can transcend its contemporary world as that an individual can overleap his own time or leap over Rhodes.

And a little later:

As the thought of the world, it appears only at a time when actuality has gone through its formative process and gained its completed state. This lesson of the concept is necessarily also apparent from history, namely that it is only when actuality has reached maturity that that the ideal appears opposite the real and reconstructs this real world, which it has grasped in its substance, in the shape of an intellectual realm. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, a shape of life has grown old, and it cannot be rejuvenated, but only recognised, by the grey in grey of philosophy; the owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the onset of dusk.

Night is falling on the state that he will go on to describe.

Francis Fukuyama is perhaps the most celebrated proponent of the ‘End of History’ thesis, which dates from the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the original essay ‘The End of History?’ Fukuyama – writing in what he conceived as following a broadly Hegelian spirit – famously claimed that the bourgeois liberal state was, in effect, the final form of human political history. The problem, of course, was that history, far from having stopped, was already preparing the surprises of 9/11 and the banking crash of 2008. A more genuinely Hegelian approach would have been to examine the various forces that were already beginning to change political and economic landscape in the 1990s, and that would create the kind of existential threats to America that we see today.

Hegel need not be understood as presenting the rational state of c1821 as finished form. It is possible to read the Elements of the Philosophy of Right as showing that that the kind of state described was incubating problems it might not be able to resolve without a radical transformation. The most obvious problem of this kind is that of the clash of right represented by the poverty created by the working of modern civil society, and its outcome, the generation of what he calls ‘the rabble’.

Hegel is aware that the nascent capitalist state and society he is describing will create a class of people deprived of the benefits of the society in which they live. They will be in it, but feel excluded from it. The very processes that allow the accumulation of wealth disadvantages others. So we get a class of disadvantaged people:

When a large mass of people sinks below the level of a certain standard of living – which automatically regulates itself at the level necessary for a member of the society in question – that feeling of right, integrity, and honour which comes from supporting oneself by one’s activity is lost. This leads to the creation of a rabble, which in turn makes it easier for disproportionate wealth to be concentrated in a few hands.

Although Hegel offers a few clues as to how their condition might be alleviated, he does not show how the problem of this rabble – the class of people who are excluded from the benefits of the society they are nominally a part – can be resolved. Although ‘poverty in itself does not reduce people to a rabble’, he is clear that poverty leads to the ‘the inward disposition associated with poverty, by inward rebellion against the rich, against society, the government, etc.’ and he concludes the addition to S 244 with the important observation that:

No one can assert a right against nature, but within the conditions of society hardship at once assumes the form of a wrong inflicted on this or that class. The important question of how poverty can be remedied is one which agitates and torments modern societies especially.

Although Hegel is able to suggest public works and colonisation as ways of aiding or sloughing off an excess population of hungry people, these are palliatives, not solutions. Poverty is not some accidental or contingent feature of the modern state as presented by Hegel, but is a necessary effect. As he remarks in his lectures of 1819-20: ‘the emergence of poverty is in general a consequence of civil society, and on the whole it arises necessarily out of it’ and he continues a little later:

In civil society it is not only natural distress against which the poor man has to struggle. The poor man is opposed not only by nature, a mere being, but also by my will. [..] Self-consciousness appears driven to the point where it no longer has any rights, where freedom has no existence. In this position, where the existence of freedom becomes something wholly contingent, inner indignation is necessary. Because the individual’s freedom has no existence, the recognition of universal freedom disappears. From this condition arises that shamelessness we find in the rabble. A rabble develops chiefly in a developed civil society.

Interestingly, he sees that such an unequal society will lead to not one but two rabbles: the poor and dispossessed at one end and the rich at the other. Both are corrupted – one by poverty, the other by riches. This is an unavoidable effect of of this kind of society and constitutes a crisis for Hegel’s presentation of the rational state. Arguably, the text that is most relevant here is in the section on morality, in the discussion of the ‘right of distress’. Here Hegel indicates what is in effect a clash of rights – that of the right to life of the destitute against the abstract right of society:

Life, as the totality of ends, has a right in opposition to abstract right […] If someone whose life is in danger were not allowed to take measures to save himself, he would be destined to forfeit all his rights; and since he would be deprived of life, his entire freedom would be negated.

If the person who is deprived of bread is not allowed to steal, then he is deprived of everything – his life and thus his right to have rights. The existence of this poverty, and of the ‘right of distress’ implies a fundamental clash of rights at the heart of society, one that does not admit of an obvious resolution: ‘in the face of this loss of right, right as such disappears’. To deny the poor man his right to a decent life is to stigmatise him as not having the right to have rights, to bare life below ‘a certain standard of living’. We can link this observation to the problem of the poor: a class of people sinking below the level of a decent life. Here we have not a minor problem that can be easily reformed out of existence, but something basic in the kind of society that Hegel is outlining: the fundamental opposition, or contradiction between a society that in accumulating wealth tends to create a class of the dispossessed and the rights of those peoples to a life that recognises them not as rabble but as full and equal citizens. The step from this to Marx’s conception of the proletariat is not hard to take.

One can, of course, read the passage, not as an awful warning of the end times of bourgeois order, but as an argument for more state spending on welfare programmes. Still, it is clear that the kinds of pressures on bourgeois society described by Hegel as endemic to that kind of system have not been getting enough attention in the unequal societies of the ‘liberal’ west.

The Elements of the Philosophy of Right points to something problematic about the ethos of a market society in which the state’s only role is restricted to preventing harm. Hegel’s conception of ethos and ‘ethical substance’ involves an orientation toward the common good that transcends the getting and spending by individuals in civil society. While the modern state is conceived as promoting individual, subjective freedom, that state is also more than the aggregation of individual wills and more than the external regulative agency which prevents harm to individuals and alleviates suffering. For Hegel, the individual achieves a kind of self-actualization through promoting a common good:

The state is the actuality of concrete freedom. But concrete freedom requires that personal individuality and its particular interests should reach their full development and gain recognition of their right for itself (within the system of the family and of civil society), and also that they should, on the one hand, pass over of their own accord into the interest of the universal, and on the other, knowingly and willingly acknowledge this universal interest even as their own substantial spirit, and actively pursue it as their ultimate end.

This implies a consideration of freedom and ethos that goes beyond a good deal of liberal thought. Arguably, a society which has no ‘Hegelian’ conception of the common good embedded in its ‘ethical substance’ will find it increasingly difficult to motivate people to help the less well off despite exhortations to generosity, the better angels of our nature, national pride etc. Invoking patriotism may prove futile, if that patriotism is fixated on a romantic narrative of great men and stirring speeches, rather than the unglamorous business of expressing social solidarity in everyday life. This ethos is difficult to encourage in a highly competitive and individualist society, in which private goods are emphasized at the expense of a broader conception of a public realm and a common good.

Growing alienation and inequality can be grasped through a patient mapping of changes in the economy and society. They can be viewed as a result of the erosion of the ethical life, or ethical substance (Sittlichkeit) that Hegel insists is essential to avoid atomism:

According to the principle of atomicity, each cares merely for himself, and does not concern himself about anything in common […] This principle gives such a person over to contingency. Our standpoint of reflection, this spirit of atomicity, this spirit of finding your honour in your individuality and not in what is common – this is destructive.

What of the ‘end of history’ thesis? It’s hard to see it as Hegel’s message about modernity. For Elements of the Philosophy of Right closes not with the state as peaceful, self-contained entity but with war, in which the modern state confronts an external Other:

In existence this negative relation of the state to itself thus appears as the relation of another to another, as if the negative were something external. The existence of this negative relation therefore assumes the shape of an event, of an involvement with contingent occurrences coming from without.

The internal affairs of the state cannot be divorced from its fate as a state among states, and from its external relations generally: they are mutually conditioning. The kind of state discussed by Hegel in the Elements of the Philosophy of Right is something quite other than a stable and reformist liberal democracy, at peace with itself and hard at work abolishing the avoidable suffering of inequality and exclusion. It has its internal contradictions: the accumulation of wealth alongside the immiseration of the poor, the creation of a rich and a poor rabble, the tendency of a capitalist order to erode the very ethical life on which social solidarity must depend. And it has the necessary confrontation with the contingencies presented by an external other – war, in the shape of antagonists whether in the form of rival states or terrorist organizations. The internal affairs of the state reflect its international relations (acts of terror from abroad helping to militarize and generalize a ‘security state’ within). But the internal problems (atomicity, inequality etc) themselves reflect the place of the state in the dynamic World Market. And Hegel’s sense of history includes the idea that that state is subject to change and decline at the ‘world historical’ level:

The particular history of a world historical nation contains, on the one hand, the development of its principle from its latent childhood phase until it blossoms out in free ethical self consciousness and makes its mark in universal history, and on the other, the period of its decline and fall – for these denote the emergence within it of a higher principle which is simply the negative of its own. This signifies the transition to the higher principle and hence the transition of world history to another nation

The contemporary examples are surely obvious. Something is coming to an end, but that something isn’t history.

 

The Hollow

Greg Jackson The New Yorker

Jonah Valente had been an object of amusement to Jack and his college classmates, and presumably he had gone on being one to other people ever since. An awkward, intense, muscle-bound young man, the sort you could imagine crashing through a wall accidentally, he had had the dim, muddled quality of students recruited to play football at the school, who either didn’t measure up academically or didn’t believe they did. Valente’s claim to fame, what had made him a figure on campus—one of that subset of maybe fifty classmates who, possessing some extravagance of character, defined the larger composite character by which the student body understood itself—came from his having abruptly quit football during sophomore year to take up painting, a passion he had developed apparently out of the blue and with a single-minded earnestness that embarrassed his more sophisticated classmates, who knew to disguise their sincerity. When Valente left the football team, changed his major, and began hanging out with a group of druggy slackers who loitered around the Visual Arts department like sun-drunk flies, the school paper ran a feature on his unusual transformation and he acquired the nickname Beaux Arts. This got shortened to B.A., and then Baa, Balente, Ballantino, the Baleen Whale, simply the Whale, and, by a different route altogether, Picasso. A year later, after spending the summer in Florence on a painting scholarship, Valente got kicked out of school. According to rumors at the time, his expulsion had to do with drugs, but Valente maintained among his friends that it was the school’s way of punishing him for quitting football. Jack had no basis for judgment. Nor did he really care. You knew very little about your classmates in the end, their real lives and disappointments and hopes, and what you did know was mostly hearsay, and often dubious and even somewhat fantastical.

In the indolent, halcyon days before graduation, Jack had thought about Valente exactly once. He had been lying completely stoned in a friend’s common room, gazing up at the crown moldings, when he realized that people called Valente “the Whale” not simply because of the association pattern in certain words but in reference to the story of Jonah. When this insight lit up within him, it seemed to glow for a minute with a profound and inarticulable meaning. Then he forgot it, and he probably would have forgotten Valente, too, if years later he hadn’t moved to the rural area where, according to their mutual friend Daniel, Valente lived at home with his mother. Jack’s house was in the next county over, half an hour away by car, but he was a newcomer and he didn’t know anyone else yet.

He had moved there with Sophie. “Sophie’s choice,” he jokingly told people. Really, they had both made the choice. But then, shortly after buying the house and leaving the city, he had, in quick succession, lost his new job and lost Sophie. She hadn’t left him because of the job (at a large financial firm), though she didn’t like his new job or believe that he liked it. Apparently, she didn’t like their new life in the country, either. Sometimes she called herself a journalist, but that wasn’t quite right. She wrote—nonfiction, she had a degree in it—but she picked up magazine assignments infrequently and had trouble finishing pieces. Some fire was missing in her, she’d be the first to admit. She bit off more than she could chew, spent months diving deeply into projects, then found herself paralyzed, unable to write a word. Jack had long ago stopped giving her advice. He simply assumed that he would earn the money, and she would (or would not) figure out how she wanted to spend her time, and either way they would have kids and a home, a garden, friends, vacations, and so on. Buying the house had taken the better part of a year. Then in the space of four weeks everything had collapsed.

Sophie said that her feelings for him hadn’t changed, but she now understood—it had surfaced inside her with a force she could scarcely describe—that something was wrong, wrong for her, anyway, with the life they had laid out before them, and if she didn’t get out now she never would. Jack pointed out that their new life had hardly begun. But she was unshakable. “I know myself,” she said. “Once I settle in, once we have a kid and the rest, I’ll never leave.” She looked not exactly desperate but as if she were drowning in a substance his words were forcing her beneath. “Please.” She placed her fingers on his forearm. And he didn’t argue. Better to give people space. Either they came back to you, he reasoned, or they disappeared into their own confusion and misery. With people he didn’t like, he thought of it as giving them enough rope. With Sophie, it was the usual indecision, the usual flightiness. That’s what he believed.

The house was in Trevi, a small hamlet upriver from the city, out past the suburbs, picturesque and quaint (if not quite as grand as its European name), with Bradford pear trees all along the main street, which in spring so filled the roadway and the air with petals that it resembled a snow scene. A water tower bearing the town’s name and stilted up on arachnid legs, with water stains rusting its gray-blue paint, dwarfed the two-story houses and brick storefronts and shops. Years ago, some local wag had christened this Trevi Fountain, and more recently a group of friends from a nearby college had purchased a disused bank building in the heart of town and opened a lunch counter of the same name.

Trevi sat on the train line north of the city and laid claim to the only stop for twenty miles in either direction, and, naturally, this brought a certain wealth and cosmopolitanism you did not find everywhere in the region, and certainly not in Rock Basin, where Jonah Valente lived with his mother. Initially, Jack had planned to take the train to work. He had been at Tabor Investments only a short time when he was fired. Before that, he had spent half a decade in the D.A.’s office and seemed in line for a political career. But he had burned out on that life, or that’s what he said, anyway, and in anticipation of starting a family he had signed on for what he believed would be a cushier position all around. Perhaps his new employer didn’t agree with this interpretation of his job, because, as soon as he gave his bosses a chance by making an impolitic remark on a business-news show, they had wasted little time firing him. No, they had dangled the threat. He could have fought to stay, but, instead, haughty and superior, he had called their bluff and forced them to follow through.

The house was an early-nineteenth-century farmhouse, fixed up and expanded over the years, painted charcoal following the new style, a color like smoke against the pitch-dark sky. It had clapboard siding and a metal roof, a mostly private small field with an old stone wall and a falling-down chicken coop, a tiny creek, and a wild profusion of ivy and flowers. Toward the main road there was an unpainted barn. Jack, who had been so invested in settling in—furnishing, repainting, touching up the trim, replacing cracked windowpanes, talking to contractors, landscapers, and arborists about what to do with the chicken coop, the yard, the silver maples and pin oaks—found himself overcome with apathy. He could hardly bring himself to wash the dishes or take out the trash. The mail piled up unopened on a chair in the entryway. Not long before, he had been a dynamo, on the phone with lawyers and water-treatment specialists, septic contractors, electricians, and insurance agents. He had learned about ground wells and leach fields, UV water-purification systems, sump pumps, pipe fittings, cell-foam insulation, byzantine tax exemptions and property-tax schedules, the life span of roofing shingles, aluminum roof coating, and septic-tank baffles. Baffles. He liked that. That just about said it! Finally, he’d simply stopped.

Daniel, Jack’s friend from school, said that Jack’s state of mind made a lot of fucking sense. “Jesus, considering everything. Get drunk, get laid,” he said. “The French would go out whoring.” Jack supposed that he had been the one to phone Daniel, but it no longer felt that way.

He had called for news of Sophie. Daniel was a successful magazine writer and someone Sophie often turned to for professional advice. It was Daniel, in fact, who had written the article on Valente for the school paper (“Portrait of the Artist as a Young Lineman”), and who now told Jack that he should give Valente a ring.

“Any word from Sophie?” Jack asked.

“Soph? She’s all right. She’s staying at her parents’, but I guess you know that.” Daniel laughed suddenly. “The last time I saw her, she was hanging out in bars, writing in a notebook, waiting for guys to text her.”

Jack responded stoically. “What guys?”

“Dates? I don’t know. I think she said she was writing a book. About contemporary dating, or dating apps. Something like that. Maybe she said ‘mating.’ ”

“I see. So she’s the one out whoring,” Jack said.

“Yeah, you’re the only one not having any fun.”

Jack could picture her sitting at the bar, her black hair unfurling about her face as she bent over her journal, pensive and daydreaming. It surprised him to find this thought, the image of her sitting there, poignant, rather than upsetting.

Still, when he reached her on the phone, he said, “So I hear you’ve been out whoring.”

She didn’t laugh at this but made a noise that suggested fatigue or annoyance, or perhaps both. “What did Daniel tell you?”

Jack gave an inaccurate, largely imaginative account of the conversation. He did not want to hurt Sophie, but at times he felt the urge to be crude, and even sometimes mean. It welled up in him like an irresistible pressure, building behind the prim dishonesty that obscured the raw, dark realities of the heart.

When he had finished, Sophie was quiet for a moment, then said, “I don’t want to get in the habit of explaining myself to you. So I guess I’m not going to.”

“If it’s freedom, it has to feel like freedom,” he suggested.

“Something like that.”

Later, with nothing to do, he telephoned Valente. “Holy shit! Jack Francis?” Boy, was it Valente—that same deep, echoic, excitable voice. “Dude, am I glad you called,” Valente said. “My mom is driving me crazy.”

It was Valente who noticed the hollow. This was not during his first visit, which he and Jack spent getting very drunk. Jack told him about Sophie, the D.A.’s office, and his brief foray into the private sector—the general cul-de-sac into which he seemed to have driven his life. Mostly, though, he listened to Valente talk about the years he had spent trying to get his artistic career off the ground, keeping body and soul together on part-time work. Valente had been employed by a house-painting crew, but something had happened and now he coached women’s rugby at a Catholic college across the river. The school was on spring break that week.

They discussed college, of course, and Jack was taken aback to find that their memories of this time did not align. He shouldn’t have been surprised by this—Valente had many strange notions—but it was vaguely unnerving to see that two people could live through the same experience and understand it so differently. Jack said that he had found everyone at college interesting at first—unique and particular and destined, it seemed, for some extraordinary future—but they had all turned out to be dull and conventional, and he increasingly saw himself as dull and conventional, too. Valente disagreed. He thought that their classmates had been deeply weird and had clung to the idea that they were dull and conventional to keep from sliding off the face of the earth.

“Look at you!” he exclaimed. “You tried to be the man in the gray plaid suit, and you got fired for mouthing off on one of those scam shows.”

This was only partly accurate. Jack, on that fateful day, had been listening to an overgrown child in what he believed were nonprescription glasses hyperventilate about the earnings figures for a Chinese company that Tabor did business with. While the man grew practically breathless and goggle-eyed at the company’s undervaluation, a graphic overlay showing a buy-sell meter flashed “Buy! Buy! Buy!”—and Jack, exhausted by this prattle, sick of Tabor and the expectation that he appear on these shows, the little devil in Jack, with an imperceptible smirk, said, “Well, yes, if you believe those figures.”

It would have been a stretch, but he could have told his bosses that he had been confused about which company Tabor was working with. Not particularly plausible, but they would have permitted him the one strike. Instead, he just said, “You really believe those numbers?” At times he felt so clear about his rightness and other people’s dishonesty that he could scarcely breathe.

He and Valente remembered the aftermath of Jonah’s expulsion differently as well. Valente seemed to believe that some sort of popular movement had arisen to reinstate him. Jack recalled nothing of the sort. He remembered jokes about Valente, and the sense, if not the outright suggestion, that it was just as well, what had happened, since there was clearly something off about their former classmate. Mythologies about Valente sprang up in his absence, as predictable as they were unlikely, but mostly he was forgotten.

Jack and Valente were sitting outside under a pergola heavy with potato vine and clematis. Jack had built a fire in the fire pit, and the wood crackled and sparked, dashing the flowers and vines in a shifting light. Valente said that he was rereading his favorite biography of van Gogh, and that the artist, who claimed to find the darkness more colorful and vivid than the day, had painted at night with lighted candles in the brim of his straw hat. “A great fire burns in me, but no one stops to warm himself,” he recited. “They pass by and see only the wisps of smoke.” That was van Gogh. Valente leaned back and tilted his head to the sky. He had lost bulk since college and now was almost thin, carved in intense relief. The light and shadow accentuated the bones and hollows of his face. He told Jack he was saving up for a summer program in France, a painting course. Not the usual bullshit, he said. You studied with some real masters. And they took you to all the famous spots: Auvers, Arles, Saint-Rémy. But it was expensive, and he couldn’t save enough unless he lived with his mom. Was he showing work? Jack wanted to know. There was a café in Rock Basin, Valente said. It wasn’t much, but it had a little gallery and he had some work up there. He told Jack that van Gogh’s first public exhibition had been in the window of an art supplier, a man he owed money to in The Hague. Van Gogh talked the guy into putting up a few of his paintings; if they sold, he said, he would use the money to pay off the debt. Well, they didn’t sell, and the dealers who saw them in the window didn’t like them, either. Valente laughed. “It just shows you,” he said, smiling at nothing but the dark. “Everyone has to start somewhere.”

“Dude, what’s in the middle of your house?”

This was how Valente greeted Jack on his third visit.

Jack handed him a beer and retrieved another for himself from the fridge. “What do you mean, the middle?”

Valente explained that he had awoken in the night with a strange intuition that there was something wrong with Jack’s house. “I kept walking around it in my head. Like circling the downstairs. Then I realized there’s an area that’s not part of any room.”

Jack shook his head; he didn’t understand. Valente said he would show him and led Jack to the closed-off section of the house, demonstrating how, approaching it from any of the six adjoining rooms, you wouldn’t notice anything odd and might even confuse it for part of the stair column. It was smaller than a room and could, he conjectured, be a sealed-in linen closet or pantry, or perhaps a disused chimney shaft—though when they walked above and below the area on the second floor and in the basement, no vertical element carried through.

Valente asked Jack for a tape measure and a pen and paper and set about sketching a rough floor plan. He drew with surprising efficiency and ease. Jack watched him. The low sun barrelled through the west-facing windows, penetrating the colored glass jars along the windowsill and painting forms like watercolor blotches on the wall. Valente guessed that the sealed-off area wasn’t much bigger than three feet by six. To know more, he’d have to go through the wall. But Jack had just finished repainting the walls. So there was a hollow, so what?

They moved out into the warm, silken dusk. A golden light crested the hill, attaching to the drifts of pollen and follicles of grass flower that rose and trembled in the air. Valente gazed into the setting sun.

He spoke at times in a way that made Jack think of a boulder tripping down a hill—slow, inexorable, always in danger of veering perilously off course.

“When you said moving here was ‘Sophie’s choice,’ were you quoting that movie?” he asked.

“It’s a book,” Jack said. “Or it was a book first.”

“About the Holocaust.”

“So they say.”

Valente squinted in perplexity. “What does the Holocaust have to do with moving here?”

“Nothing,” Jack said. “It’s just a bad joke.”

Valente paused and frowned like a mime feigning thought. “When the Gestapo came to Picasso’s studio during the Occupation, there was a photo of ‘Guernica’ lying around. They asked him, ‘Did you do this?’ and he said, ‘No, you did!’ ”

Jack looked at him. “Is that true?”

Valente shrugged. “I don’t know. That’s what they say. Picasso said art is a lie that makes us see the truth.”

Jack didn’t respond, and Valente closed his eyes. In the distance, the sunlight caught a window on the toolshed and burned a liquid, blinding gold. Valente’s face had folds and pleats like an accordion. He’s aged more than the rest of us, Jack thought.

“There’s a water tower in Rock Basin,” Valente said, “just like in Trevi.” His eyes were still closed as he spoke. “For years, Rope Man and I talked about climbing up one night and painting it. Probably we were going to paint some bullshit—something lewd, you know. But now I think I’d just paint big letters that say ‘You are free.’ ”

The wrens made their evening call—jiminy, jiminy, jiminy.

“Rope Man?” Jack said.

“Friend from high school.” Valente opened his eyes. “We called him Rope Man because he had this Polish last name no one could pronounce. It started with ‘rope.’ ”

“What’s Rope Man up to now?”

“He’s dead.” Valente’s voice was flat and he stared straight ahead at the chicken coop with its busted-up lath buried in honeysuckle.

“What happened?”

For a second, Jack thought he saw a savage fire in Valente’s eyes, then the fire blinked, settling into mildness, like a star.

“When van Gogh’s cousin wouldn’t marry him, he put his hand in a lamp flame,” Valente said. “Her family wouldn’t let him see her, and he said, ‘Let me see her for as long as I can keep my hand in the flame.’ I guess it was something like that with Rope Man.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Jack said.

Valente picked at the grass where his fingers hung. “Nobody noticed he was burning up.”

“And what happened with van Gogh?”

“They blew out the lamp,” Valente said. The sun had gone mostly behind the hill. A single ray wavered above the ridge like a filament of glass. “Van Gogh didn’t kill himself, you know. Everyone thinks he did, but it was some teen-agers that liked to prank him. They shot him—probably by accident.”

“I never heard that.”

“Look it up.”

Jack closed his eyes. A faint residue of red or orange seeped through his eyelids. “Tell me more about van Gogh,” he said.

And Valente spoke, of wheat fields and flowers and crows and turbulent skies, of painting loneliness and sorrow and anguish, of moments when the veil of time and of inevitability (to use the painter’s own words) seems to open for the blink of an eye, of boats in storms, and boats pulling other boats—towing them, tugging them—and how one boat sometimes pulls another, while that second, helpless boat prepares to reverse roles someday and pull the first boat through a storm, or a time of special need. Valente described an impossible person, a scoundrel, a tramp, difficult and gruff, prone to fighting, taking up with prostitutes, rejected by everyone, repulsive even to his parents, unlovable, homeless, driven by inexpressible love, or love that was expressible only in a particular form that did not allow it to be shared between two people, and that was therefore cursed, a love that was refused while he was alive, and only, when this cretin, this parasite, offensive to every standard of good taste, was gone, did everyone see how much they did want his peculiar, displaced, and overripe love, and the same respectable people who had found him so revolting now clutched him to their breast with the fiercest longing, because a certain intensity of color reminded them, or so Valente said in his own way, of intimations of such intensity in moments of their own that they had forgotten or suppressed.

Jack had intended to get past the hollow, but he found that he couldn’t. At night, before falling asleep, or having awoken to darkness, he felt the eerie, mystical nearness of it, and this unsettled him. He started, without realizing it at first, to orient himself in the house and on the property in relation to the hollow. “Like Mecca, or Jerusalem,” he said, chuckling to himself as if the joke would rob the hollow of its power. Inspecting the walls, he found no crack or crease; the paint and plaster ran flawlessly to the corners, the ceiling, the baseboards—there was no easy way in. He began to feel angry with the sellers. Surely they had known about this secret hollow and said nothing. Maybe they had even closed it up.

Spring break ended, and Valente returned to coaching. Jack saw less of him. Jack did not miss seeing him, but not seeing anyone presented its own problem; namely, what to do with himself. He felt a great restlessness growing inside him, something vast and formless. He lay in the sunlit grass on the hill, watching the leaves migrate in the breeze. The fields and orchards in the distance appeared overexposed, gilded on one side with seams of light.

The days were blending together into one composite day. He was drinking too much, but what else was there to do? He kept thinking about a concert in the city that he and Sophie had gone to over the holidays. It was at a church uptown, somewhere on the East Side. Dark, heavy stones composed the walls and vault of the church—an intimate, tall, solid space. He no longer remembered what the concert was—a mixed program of canonical and newer pieces, played by a spare, shifting ensemble. The church was small, and attendance was sparse. What he remembered was the sound of trucks, garbage trucks, on the street outside, heavy, vibrating, accelerating, braking, letting out hisses of compressed air, and the complaints of their straining engines as they stopped and started along their route. The sound of the trucks, low and sonorous through the stone walls, had made the music more beautiful somehow, accentuating perhaps the simultaneous existence of the disparate realities that hold our fragile world together in its brittle shell. The music tiptoed along the knife edge of its key, its tones, giving the illusion of freedom when there were always far more missteps than safe harbors and nimble plunges into grace.

When Valente came over on a Friday evening, his long hair hung in greasy locks and his face was patched with dirt.

“We had a match today,” he explained and took the beer Jack offered.

“I thought you were the coach,” Jack said.

Valente drank deeply, answering too quickly and choking. “Yeah, but when we win I let the girls tackle me.” He coughed to clear his throat. “Blood in, blood out, you know—like the military.”

“Blood in, blood out? How many girls tackle you?”

“I don’t know. Fifteen? You should see me,” Valente said. “I’m like Gulliver.”

Jack pointed at his face. “Did someone punch you in the eye?”

Valente’s voice was soft and wistful. “Man, those girls are crazy,” he said. “They love to beat me up.”

A silence fell, and they briefly regarded the birds streaking through the backlit trees, stenciled silhouettes against an aureate sky.

Jack coughed lightly in his fist. “So . . . what should we do about this hollow?”

“Hollow?”

“The chamber in the wall.”

Valente seemed not to understand. “Oh, that,” he said after a minute. “But who cares about that?”

Who cares? Jack thought. You were the one who brought it up!

“Here’s what you do,” Valente said. “Drill a hole in the wall and run a fibre-optic spy camera through it.”

“I don’t have a fibre-optic spy camera,” Jack said.

“Yeah.” Valente nodded. “Too bad.”

In the creek at their feet, tiny fish idled and darted in the current. Jack watched them move beneath the braiding water.

Valente finished his beer, crushing the can between his strong, heavy hands, and grinned.

Jack grinned back. “Hey, why’d you get kicked out of school?” he asked.

Until that moment Jack had felt indifferent to this question, or worse than indifferent: he felt the answer would disappoint him. But a sudden annoyance at Valente had overcome him, a sense of the precise limit to what Valente could be or do, a sense—how to put it?—of some insuperable grossness in Valente’s character that would never, even with boundless fellowship and care, settle into sufficient self-awareness. Standing beside the green-violet Ricinus, the former football player kicked at tufts of moss and a crust of caked mud that lay along the bank of the creek. He smiled without turning, as if at the little swimming fish.

“I wasn’t, you know, ‘kicked out,’ ” he said.

“You weren’t.”

“I could’ve come back.” Valente gazed at the trees. “Didn’t want to.”

Why was that? Jack asked.

Valente squinted inquisitively as the leaves above them shook like silver-green sequins. “I was doing so much acid that summer,” he said after a minute. “Summer after they told me to take a year off. I don’t remember why, but I had keys to George Diehl’s apartment. You remember Diehl? I never liked that kid, but he was always down to get high. Well, George was away for some reason, and I’d been tripping all night. I couldn’t come down. I remember it was sunrise when I got to his place, and I lay down in his bed, but I couldn’t sleep. So I started pacing from room to room. For, like, hours. There were just four rooms, but I couldn’t stop. I was getting spooked, so I decided to watch something. George had this projector hooked up to a DVD player, but I couldn’t find any DVDs, so I just pressed Play to see what was in there. All of a sudden there were these people dancing and singing. Tons of them, in matching costumes, doing elaborate routines. They made shapes like flowers, geometric shapes. All this stuff. Too much to follow. At first I thought, This is cool, but then I started to get a bad feeling. They were like aliens. Like they were on a different planet, dancing in outer space. Somewhere you could never get to, you know? And then I thought, No, I was wrong. It was our world, the dancing planet, and I was the one who couldn’t get there.”

Jack stared at him. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“What?”

“I asked you why you didn’t go back to school.”

“Oh, yeah. Shit . . .” Valente laughed. “I guess that’s when I knew I’d never go back. I was covered in dust.”

Jack shook his head. “Dust?”

Valente nodded. “Picasso said art washes the dust of the everyday from the soul. You get it?”

A splitting pressure had arisen in Jack’s head, and the day’s brightness was making him nauseous. “Dude, you got to get off this Picasso and van Gogh thing.”

“What do you mean?”

“No one’s ever going to take you seriously, going on about Picasso and van Gogh, and wildflowers and shit,” Jack said. “I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. Find some obscure artist to talk about. Better yet, shut up. Don’t say anything. Christ!” he burst out. “You have to show people you can play the game.”

“What game?”

Jack massaged his forehead with his hand. “Don’t be obtuse.”

“But they’re the best,” Valente said quietly.

“And you know”—Jack continued without really hearing him—“it’s not like because some artist was poor or misunderstood, and you’re poor and misunderstood, things are going to work out for you. Millions of people fail. Millions for every Picasso. It’s not like failing means you’re the next van Gogh.”

“I don’t think that,” Valente said.

“Good. Baby steps toward sanity. But don’t think the people who succeed don’t play the game. They all do. Picasso did. They dance the goddam dance. Purity of spirit’s just some shit they talk about once they’ve made it to make the rest of us believe—”

Jack shut up. Valente looked so dirty and bedraggled, leaves and twigs feathered in his hair and something fierce and sad in his look. Jack could only say, more softly, “Look, kemo sabe. Tell me, where does it go from here?”

Valente didn’t respond. That haunted, confused kid they’d once called Picasso, as if in affection, with no affection, with laughter, with doubt, said nothing. He walked off. After maybe ten paces he stopped, as if about to turn, but then continued on to his car.

Jack watched him go.

The ignition sounded, and from the open window of his Toyota Valente shouted, “You’re covered in dust!”

“So what?” Jack said

“You covered me in your dust,” Valente yelled at him, putting the car in gear and lurching forward.

“I didn’t do it,” Jack shouted back. “It was those fucking rugby girls!”

But Valente was already speeding down the drive and most likely didn’t hear him.

“We’ve got a hollow,” Jack said. He was talking to Sophie on the phone.

“Am I supposed to know what that means?”

“Between the walls. There’s an empty space.”

She spoke with a certain circumspection. “Isn’t that . . . normal?”

“Not like this. It’s a big hollow. Not as big as a room, maybe, but close.”

A longer pause accreted on the line. “Jack, what’s this about?”

“It’s your house, too,” he said. “I thought you’d like to know there’s an unexplained cavity in the wall.”

“Is everything all right?”

“Besides the unexplained cavity in the wall? Yeah, everything’s awesome.”

“You sound . . . I don’t know.” She sounded tired herself. “Is everything really all right?”

Jack soothed his hot cheeks and brow against the cool wood of the doorframe. “Do you remember that concert we went to over the holidays, Soph? Somewhere uptown, off Park maybe. There were these trucks moving in the street. You could hear them through the walls while the music played.”

She didn’t respond for so long Jack thought the line had gone dead. “I remember the concert,” she said finally. “I don’t remember the trucks.”

“There were trucks.”

“All right, there were trucks.”

“And the sound of the music . . .” He no longer knew what he meant to say. The scope of something inexpressible, a mammoth, ungraspable intimation, had overtaken him.

Jack called Valente to apologize. He had heard nothing from him in a week. To his surprise, Valente’s mother answered the phone.

“Jonah’s in the hospital,” she said. “He’s all right, don’t worry, but he’s not supposed to see anyone yet.”

“What happened?”

There was a pause. “How do you know Jonah?” she asked.

Jack told her they were old college friends, and that he’d recently moved to the area.

“Maybe Jonah would like to tell you himself, when he’s feeling better,” his mother said.

Jack pondered this briefly but soon turned his attention to other things. A week later, quite unexpectedly, he received a letter from Valente in the mail. It was written on brown card stock in a large, handsome hand:

Hey Jack,

First off, don’t feel bad when you hear what happened or like you owe me an apology or whatever. We argued, so what? I don’t take it personally. But don’t add this to your list of reasons I’m crazy. I’m not that crazy. Just a little crazier than you. Or maybe not—ha-ha!

I never told you this but sometimes I get pretty low. Van Gogh’s last words were “la tristesse durera toujours,” which in French means “the sadness shall last forever.” But he died with a smile on his face, they say, and sometimes I think about that and think life isn’t so bad.

You’re right, I talk about van Gogh and Picasso a lot. What can I say? They’re my heroes and it gives me comfort to keep them close. It isn’t cool, but I guess I’m not cool. When I try to be, I feel like I’m suffocating, you know? I told myself, I’ll just say what’s on my mind and people can think what they want. Dumb, huh? I don’t think I’ll ever learn to play the game you were talking about, but maybe that’s O.K., too, do you think?

The doctors say my main issue is a lack of proportion. Well, I can’t argue with that. I get strange notions and it’s like I can’t resist. After our argument I was thinking about Rope Man, and I got it in my head I was going to climb the water tower and paint it, like Rope Man and I always talked about. I guess I was pretty drunk. Everyone says I’m lucky I didn’t hurt myself worse. Rugby’s out for a while, but the doctors are coming around to the idea that I’m not a danger to myself.

One more van Gogh story, if you won’t chop my head off for telling it—ha-ha! I don’t have my books here so it’s from memory. In a letter to Theo, van Gogh says he knows he’s a nonentity, a bum, basically, in the eyes of the world. And despite that, he says, he’d like to show in his work what’s in the heart of such a nobody. I think that’s pretty cool.

The rugby girls came to see me the other day, six or seven of them. They’re crazy, those girls! They brought me brownies they baked. I wish I’d known they were pot brownies before I ate so many. . . . I think the girls felt bad they couldn’t fight me, ’cause two of them started wrestling right there in the hospital until Nurse Ratched kicked them out. (Actually, her name’s Sally and she’s all right.) But it cheered me up to see the girls. Hey, don’t worry about me! In no time at all I’ll be back out there painting with birthday candles burning in my hat.

Your bro,

Jonah

It was two years before Jack saw Valente again. On the day in question, he and Sophie were across the river, poking around in antique shops and cafés while their infant daughter napped in her papoose. In Chandor, a town just north of Rock Basin, Jack found Valente at a craft fair, working one of the stalls. All around him were small garish canvases, showing still-lifes and cottages and bright flowering bushes.

“Jack Francis!” Valente bellowed when Jack approached.

“Hi, Jonah.” Sophie was in a different part of the fair, looking at jewelry, or retailored vintage dresses.

“What’s crackin’?” Valente appeared genuinely pleased to see him. Jack, at least, read no trace of their last encounter or the intervening years in his look, just that restive quality, as if every instant teetered on an uneasy precipice.

“Nothing,” Jack said. “Driving around. I’m here with Sophie. And a little human that popped out of her.”

Valente grinned. “Sophie finally made her choice.”

“Yeah, I guess.” Jack had forgotten his old joke. “These yours?” he said and pointed to the paintings.

“These?” Valente’s face went blank and a sudden humorless fire appeared on it. The shift was so precipitate that Jack wondered for a second whether he had, in fact, said something different and unforgivable.

“What?” Jack said.

Valente threw his head back and laughed. “Man, you must really think I suck at painting. This shit?” He cast a hand about. “I’m just doing my friend Raj a favor. I wouldn’t be caught dead painting this bullshit.”

“I see,” Jack said, not entirely sure that he did. “How’s your stuff going?”

Valente shrugged. “I’m not in the Louvre yet.”

“No.” Jack picked up and put down a canvas that seemed to show a strangely colored child or doll, or possibly a clown.

Valente was asking him a question. It took Jack a moment to realize that he was asking about the hollow. What had happened with it. “Hollow?” Jack repeated. The word triggered something in him, a sense of déjà vu, but he couldn’t quite catch the recollection. He hadn’t thought about the hollow in months, years. It seemed much longer ago than it could have been that Valente had brought it to his attention, a memory far more deeply buried in the past than the facts allowed. He stared at Valente impassively, although some slight mirth may have danced in his eyes. “What hollow?”

Valente narrowed his eyes, trying to assess what was taking place. He held Jack’s gaze, then he smiled. A snort erupted from him, a laugh, and then Jack was laughing, too. They laughed with a gathering force, truly cracking up. Jack didn’t know the last time he’d laughed so hard, or why, really, they were laughing, but they were roaring, fighting for breath.

“What’s so funny?” Sophie was tapping Jack on the shoulder. “What are you laughing at?”

Jack turned, grinning, and was about to shrug, when Valente cut in and in his loud, abrupt voice answered, “Sadness.”

Their laughter petered out. Jack studied the thinning, wrinkled skin around Valente’s eyes, waiting for something to happen. Valente was smiling broadly, entirely in earnest. It was the earnestness of a large, clumsy person, crashing through a world of glass doors and gossamer screens. Jack realized that he was waiting for Sophie to suggest that she had misheard, but she said nothing. Only pursed her lips. He breathed quietly. The day was crystalline, blue, touched by clouds. Cool. A light breeze. The market hummed. A burble of chatter. Dogs’ barks. The smell of cut flowers, of burning. Colors. Crushed leaves. Exhaust. A chime, tinkling. A yellow shawl. Time pooling. Opening. A moment, before anyone spoke. ?

Greg Jackson is the author of the short-story collection “Prodigals.” His début novel, “The Dimensions of a Cave,” will be published in 2023.

 ‘It’s a walkout!’

Inside the fast-food workers’ season of rebellion

Weeks after most employees walked out of a McDonald's restaurant in Bradford, Pa., protesting low wages and work conditions, the business advertises it is hiring and increasing starting pay from $9.25 an hour to $10 an hour.

Story by Greg Jaffe Washington Post

BRADFORD, Pa. — Dustin Snyder was tired of the low wages, the 60-hour workweeks and the impossible-to-please customers, and so in early September the assistant general manager at a McDonald’s here drafted a petition that laid bare months of building anger and frustration.

“We are all leaving,” his petition threatened, “and hope you find employees that want to work for $9.25 an hour.” Nearly all of his two dozen employees had signed it. A few added their own flourishes.

“We need a RAISE,” one scribbled next to her signature.

“Piss off,” wrote another.

Dustin, 21, could feel his heart pounding in his chest as he fed the petition into the fax machine in the McDonald’s office, punched in the number for his bosses 80 miles away in Buffalo and hit send. Another low-wage worker rebellion in a season full of them.

A once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, a debilitating recession and trillions in government aid had caused something to shift in the world’s largest economy. Hourly wages for fast food workers rose nearly 14 percent last year, the fastest growth on record. All over America people were quitting jobs at record rates. Even in a place such as Bradford, with its shrinking population and 30 percent poverty rate, low-wage service workers sensed that they finally had a little power.

Soon after Dustin sent the petition, the phone was ringing, and the regional supervisor in Buffalo was demanding to know who was behind it. Dustin’s first instinct was to panic and plead ignorance. An hour later he called and confessed.

“I was trying to get better pay for my people,” Dustin said.

Dustin Snyder, 21, now the former assistant general manager at McDonald's, and his co-workers staged a walkout and quit their jobs. He helped them find better paying jobs; now he rises early in the morning to pick some up and drive them to work at a lumber mill.

“There are better ways to go about this,” the regional supervisor replied. She had been thinking about boosting pay at the Bradford McDonald’s, she said, but she was not going to give into threats or give up control. Because of the petition, no one was getting a raise. If the workers did not like it, they could quit.

Days earlier Dustin had accepted a job at a lumber mill that paid $11.50-an-hour, or 60 cents more than he made as assistant general manager. But he did not really want to quit McDonald’s. He liked his co-workers, who had become some of his closest friends, and he liked being a leader. He just wanted some affirmation and a little more money, both for himself and his team.

Dustin asked his employees to gather around him in the kitchen. Egg McMuffins sat half made on the counter. A clock on the cash register that tracked the restaurant’s drive-through times and transmitted the data back to corporate ticked away the seconds since their last completed order.

“Why would you want to work for a company that doesn’t value you?” Dustin asked. He turned to one of the restaurant’s longest serving employees. “You’ve been here for five years,” he said. “What have you got for it? Nothing.”

The workers, clad in their black uniforms, ball caps and nonslip shoes, stared at him, unsure what they were supposed to do next. Dustin explained that he was leaving and locking up the restaurant. If they followed, he promised he would help them all find better jobs. “How many of you want to go with me?” Dustin asked.

Initially, there was silence. Then seven of the nine raised their hands. Two who decided not to join took seats at a table in the empty restaurant. The rest tossed aside their headsets and abandoned their posts at the drive-through and registers. Instead of racing to serve customers, they began making food for themselves: a Quarter Pounder, a large fries, an iced caramel coffee with whipped cream and extra pumps of caramel.

Dustin’s anxiety, which had been building since he sent the fax, began to ebb. His co-workers were ebullient. “It’s a walkout,” one yelled as they headed out into an economy where low-wage workers, long-accustomed to feeling scorned, ignored and invisible, were realizing they suddenly had some agency.

An aerial view of the downtown area in Bradford, where the poverty rate is 30 percent. A group of co-workers walked out and quit their jobs at McDonald's over unfair pay, long hours and frustrated customers, disrupting the social order in this town.

We’re done

In the restaurant’s windowless back office, Dustin was calling Stephanie Kelley, the Bradford McDonald’s general manager, to tell her what was happening.

“What if no one goes with you?” she asked.

“Everyone already said they were,” Dustin replied.

Stephanie, 36, had recently accepted a job at a bank in town and, like Dustin, was finishing out her final two weeks. She’d spent nearly a decade at the Bradford McDonald’s, working her way up from the bottom to the restaurant’s top job. To join the protest was to throw away a reputation for hard work she had fought to build. To stay home was to abandon her employees.

“It won’t look good to get fired from McDonald’s,” she told Dustin on the phone.

“I’ve already made up my mind,” Dustin replied.

The discontent driving the Bradford workers and so many others had been there for years, an ever-present aspect of an economy that could be especially cruel to anyone without an education. The pandemic — the fights with customers over masks and the fears of falling sick — added to the strain. But it was the labor shortages, which extended to just about every part of the country, that caused workers’ long-suppressed anger to burst into the open.

Unlike the strikes of an earlier era, most of the walkouts included no picket lines. Rarely did the workers even make demands. “WE ALL QUIT SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE,” read the message last June on a Burger King marquee in Lincoln, Neb., where, according to the workers, the air conditioner had been broken for weeks and the temperatures in the kitchen soared past 90 degrees.

Sometimes, workers left behind notes for bosses and customers that resembled parting primal screams: “We will not work for a company that DOES NOT care!!!” employees at a Del Taco in Circleville, Ohio, wrote.

“The staff at this location has walked out because we were being treated poorly, overworked and underpaid,” read a message from the employees of a Biggby Coffee in Toledo. Often the dashed-off notes became hits on social media, passed along by equally fed-up workers. Sometimes they would show up in a short segment on the local television news, before fading away.

Definitive numbers on these small-scale walkouts do not exist. The Bureau of Labor Statistics only tracks major stoppages that involve more than 1,000 workers. But Mike Elk, a labor reporter and founder of paydayreport.com, has compiled a database of 1,600 walkouts since March 2020 that included as many as 100,000 workers.

Stephanie was now deciding whether she wanted to be one of them. Like her staff, she had come to feel “degraded” and “belittled” by her bosses and some of the customers. The franchise owner had set the Bradford McDonald’s starting wage at $9.25 an hour, while new workers at his McDonald’s less than 20 miles away in Olean, N.Y., where the minimum wage was higher, were earning $15 an hour. The low pay had made it almost impossible for Stephanie and Dustin to retain workers and keep the restaurant running.

Stephanie’s call with Dustin lasted only about a minute. She decided she could not let Dustin and their day-shift crew “do it alone.” She hung up and texted the night shift staff. “I want you all to know that everyone on the day shift just walked out and quit,” she wrote. She said she was joining the walkout — “Effective 10:51 a.m. I no longer work at McDonald’s” — and encouraged the rest of the staff to quit too.

“I believe that you all are worth more than anything they’re giving you,” she continued. “I am proud of all of you. Every single one of you. Whether you quit or not, I am proud of you.”

Then she drove to the McDonald’s where she saw cars backing up in the drive-through. Most of the workers were gathered in the parking lot, laughing and smiling. The worker who had been with the restaurant for five years was sobbing. She had been swept up in the initial excitement of the walkout but was now worried about finding a new job and paying her rent. She was terrified of losing her subsidized apartment.

“We will help you get a job that pays better,” Dustin reassured her. He and Stephanie were going to drive everyone to the Burger King, two miles away, where Stephanie knew the general manager and the pay started at $10 an hour.

Before Dustin locked the doors, he realized there was one last thing he wanted to do for his McDonald’s customers. He could not find a pen so he snatched a blue highlighter from the back office. “Due to lack of pay we all quit,” he scribbled.

In the parking lot, a half-dozen employees were waiting on him for rides to Burger King. The line of cars full of hungry and angry customers now wrapped around the building.

“Hey! We just want a Quarter Pounder and fries,” a man called out to Dustin from his car.

“Well we just want to be paid more and treated better,” Dustin replied.

Former McDonald's employees Dustin Snyder, 21, right, Matthew Arndt, 31, second from right, RJ Schmidt, 19, center, with his fiancee Kiera Walls, 19, and Dave Putnam, 23, left, get together after work in Bradford.

‘Tough times’

Dustin and his co-workers had come to feel that no one understood what their jobs and lives were really like. The biggest frustration was the pay, which had been $8.25 an hour until the franchise owner boosted it by $1 a few months into the pandemic.

“We understand these are tough times,” Enrico Francani, the owner wrote in a letter to the staff, explaining the increase.

“How can you say you understand tough times when you’re only paying people $9.25 an hour?” Dustin recalled thinking.

The restaurant continued to lose long-serving shift managers throughout 2021 to entry-level jobs at Walmart ($13.75 an hour) and Tim Hortons ($12 an hour). The departures hit the Bradford McDonald’s especially hard at the beginning of the month, when disability checks arrived and customers had money to burn on burgers and fries.

“Can anyone go into work right now? They’re down 6 shifts and drowning,” Stephanie wrote on the employee group chat on Sept. 1, four days before the walkout.

A few minutes passed with no response.

“Anyone??” she asked again.

The only thing that seemed to matter to the corporate office were the numbers: revenue, drive-through times and the weekly tally of complaints. Once, Dustin worked 30 hours straight to prepare the restaurant for a health inspection. It passed, but the criticism from the bosses about the restaurant’s cleanliness and his inability to retain employees continued unabated. Heavy turnover led to more mistakes and longer wait times for customers, who took their frustration out on workers who already felt stigmatized by their fast-food jobs.

“The hate is towards the wrong people,” said Caitlin Cox, a shift manager, newly pregnant with her second child. “It’s ridiculous.” She was certain that customers, who regularly belittled the staff for enforcing mask mandates or botching orders, would judge her harshly for having a baby while “flipping burgers.” And she had come to dread the thought of working at McDonald’s while she was visibly pregnant.

In Bradford, once home to entrepreneurs and wealthy oil barons, the population is shrinking. Buildings in the downtown area are mostly empty.

The owner, ferried by his driver, typically visited the Bradford location just once a year, employees said, and not even that often once the pandemic hit. Dustin believed that Francani was relying on his Pennsylvania restaurants — with their low salaries — to offset higher costs in New York where he had to pay his McDonald’s workers $15 an hour.

Francani did not respond to a list of detailed questions regarding his Bradford location. In a statement he said that he had initiated a series of “listening sessions” with workers and was adding paid sick leave and raising starting wages in Bradford. “We’re very grateful for the outstanding efforts of the McDonald’s Bradford team,” he wrote.

McDonald’s USA issued a statement in which it said it was “disappointed” by the poor treatment that employees had endured at the Bradford restaurant: “The allegations shared in this reporting are deeply troubling and have no place in a McDonald’s-branded restaurant. Quite simply, they are unacceptable.”

Dustin understood that Francani was entitled to pay his Bradford workers about 40 percent less than his nearby New York employees. “It’s a good idea, but you’re hurting people,” he said. “At what price is it enough? At what point is it just not worth it? What’s the cost of another human being to you?”

LEFT: A help wanted sign hangs on the window as diners eat at Leo's Sub Shop in Bradford. Many downtown businesses are looking to hire help. CENTER: Players Downtown bar in Bradford has a “help wanted” sign outside. RIGHT: Kabob's at the Option House restaurant in Bradford is also hiring.

‘A high school job’

These were some of the questions that people in Bradford were fighting about in the immediate aftermath of the walkout. Less than an hour had passed before someone snapped a picture of Dustin’s sign on the drive-through speaker and posted it in a Facebook group called “B----ing Bout Bradford.”

Most of those weighing in on the McDonald’s walkout were service workers: certified nursing assistants, waitresses, security guards and store cashiers who were barely scraping by themselves. Theirs were the voices of a place whose best days seem behind it. On Bradford’s mostly empty Main Street, Art Deco, Italianate and Neo-Classical buildings loom as a reminder of an earlier era when the city was home to wealthy oil barons and hungry entrepreneurs. The Zippo factory, opened in 1932, still ships its iconic windproof lighters all over the world. But the region has been bleeding manufacturing jobs and people for years.

“Do you have the next great idea?” asked signs from the Bradford Area Alliance offering a $20,000 prize to help seed a local start-up. Set amid abandoned storefronts, the question came off as a plea.

Some speaking out on “B----ing Bout Bradford” blasted the work stoppage as an act of entitlement — another sign of America’s moral decay and waning work ethic. “You got what you deserve when your paycheck came in,” wrote a 41-year-old father of two young boys. “Probably didn’t deserve that because it sounds like you were just there putting in time with bad attitudes instead of working to make your situation better.”

Other commenters called fast food “a high school job,” whose long hours and low pay were supposed to spur young workers to strive for more. Dustin and his crew, they said, should “go back to school,” “quit making excuses,” get a second job or move to a city with higher wages and more opportunity. Or they complained about the service at the McDonald’s (“I’ve never one f---ing time got my order right! Not once!”) and derided the penmanship on Dustin’s hastily scribbled sign. (“Maybe they should be home practicing their handwriting skills.”) The McDonald’s workers’ demands to be seen and heard had broken some unspoken rule; their anger seemed to threaten Bradford’s social order.

Others countered that big companies, such as McDonald’s, had a moral obligation to pay their employees enough to survive. “We have families and bills and can’t even get through with the pay we get,” wrote a cashier at the Bradford Dollar Tree. And they called for a higher minimum wage to match the $15 an hour that workers were making in New York.

Just like the critics, the walkout’s defenders cast the protest as a symptom of a much larger societal disease, made worse by the labor shortage and the long pandemic.

“People in the service industry are done with the disrespect,” wrote a local physician. “I don’t think it’s just about the money. … Whether it’s about flipping burgers or saving lives they crave gratitude and validation. Society has become so intolerant. So disrespectful. So judgmental. So cruel. Let’s change it.”

Soon some of the McDonald’s workers were weighing in to explain themselves and defend their colleagues. “You have NO RIGHT to talk down on those workers when they take a stand and have had enough,” wrote John Lockwood, who had worked at the restaurant for 20 years and had quit earlier that morning. “If you don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes, keep your f---ing mouth shut.”

Former McDonald's employee Shakira Griffin, 17, hangs out with her fiance Chaz Gray, 20, in Bradford. “I was standing up for myself and what I deserve,” she said of the walkout. “I’ve never done that before.” (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)

‘The McRejects’

Of the Bradford McDonald’s workers who remained after the waves of spring and summer attrition, five had intellectual or physical disabilities that made it hard for them to find work at a better pay, Dustin said. Two were 17-year-old girls who had quit school and were homeless. In the immediate aftermath of the walkout, one of those teenage girls, Shakira Griffin, was waiting in the McDonald’s parking lot for Dustin to give her a ride to Burger King, where she planned to fill out an application.

She phoned her boyfriend and her mother. Neither answered. A few hours later, she texted both to let them know about the walkout. “Steph and Dustin is helping us get jobs,” she wrote.

Shakira had started at McDonald’s in March after her mother lost custody of her and her father and his new girlfriend had kicked her out of their house. Before she dropped out of high school in the spring, her teachers had tried to look out for her as best they could. Her favorite, a special-education teacher, had slipped her $25 to buy some bras and on her birthday, gave her a dark, green American Eagle hoodie that hung loosely on her skinny frame.

“I could tell you that it wasn’t cheap!” said Shakira of the sweatshirt that she wore everywhere.

Like so many of her colleagues, Shakira had grown accustomed to being told she was not good enough: by teachers, fellow students and even her parents. Now she was jubilant. “I was doing stuff with people besides arguing,” she said of the walkout. “I was standing up for myself and what I deserve. I’ve never done that before.”

Griffin and Gray take a walk in the woods.

By nightfall a crew of $15-an-hour McDonald’s workers had arrived from New York and reopened the drive-through, though the rest of the restaurant remained closed. The Bradford workers were still buzzing with excitement.

“Let’s all stand outside the mcdonalds and riot. Hahaha,” one crew member wrote on their chat.

“I love all you guys. You are amazing,” another added.

“We’ll be friends forever,” wrote Matthew Arndt, who was developmentally delayed and autistic. “Remember my door. My heart is open.”

Six years earlier, Matt had taken a Greyhound bus to Bradford from Tacoma, Wash., to visit a woman he met while playing a video game called “Second Life.” The woman turned out to be married. Now, Matt, 32, lived with her, her husband and another developmentally delayed woman in a rotting brown and yellow two-story rental, which had no working furnace, black mold and bedbugs. Matt was the only one in the house with a job, and they had all come to depend on his salary to survive.

He had not been back to see his father or siblings since arriving in Bradford. His job at McDonald’s was his refuge. His co-workers had become his family. Sometimes he and the rest of the night shift crew would finish work around 2 a.m. and walk two miles to the Sheetz coffee shop, where they would talk and eat mozzarella sticks, boneless chicken bites and burritos until dawn.

Matt texted his colleagues that the regional supervisor had called him and was trying to entice him to stay, but that he was not going to betray his friends.

“She’s desperate now,” he wrote.

“Yeah,” agreed Shakira, who also had received a call. “She really is desperate.”

The workers continued texting for several more hours. They complained about the people in town who were deriding them for walking out.

“People think fast food workers are lazy,” one former crew member wrote. “All they want is their muffins and nuggets.”

“Yeah, we ain’t people,” another replied.

They traded gossip about which workers might be staying. Several noted hopefully that the drive-through line at Burger King seemed longer than usual and that maybe the shutdown had scared some McDonald’s customers away.

Someone suggested they rename their McDonald’s group chat. Matt came up with the idea that they immediately and unanimously decided to adopt: “The McRejects.”

Dustin Snyder, center, walks through the parking lot at the lumber mill with co-workers Jeremy Richardson, left, Dicky Keaton, rear, and RJ Schmidt, right, after Dustin picked them all up for a ride to work in Bradford.

‘A slap in the face’

Dustin rose at 4 a.m. and headed out the door to his car, still clad in his camouflage pajama pants and a hoodie. A month had passed since the walkout. It was his day off, but he had promised two of his former McDonald’s crew members, who he had helped land jobs with him at the lumber mill, that he would drive them to work every day. Neither had cars.

“Jesus it’s cold out this morning,” Dustin’s first pickup of the morning said as he slid into the passenger seat. “I left my window open last night and just about froze my balls off.”

“Yesterday was colder,” Dustin replied as he steered through Bradford’s empty streets. The “check engine” light on his dashboard glowed.

Most of the McRejects found new jobs for higher pay at Burger King, Dunkin’ and the Save-A-Lot grocery store. Shakira landed a $10 an hour position stocking shelves at a Crosby’s convenience store and was living with her boyfriend’s family. Matt and his best friend from McDonald’s, David Putnam, were making $12 an hour at Tim Hortons doughnut shop. The extra money meant David, who was raising his 2-year-old son on his own, no longer needed donated food from the “Blessing Box” near his house. He had recently even been able to treat his mother and stepfather to dinner at the Hunan Buffet across the parking lot from his new job.

Matt’s finances were still tight. One of his housemates had recently been kicked off disability, and he was using his extra pay to help cover her portion of the rent.

After just three weeks at the lumber mill, Dustin got a $1 raise to $12.50-an-hour, part of a companywide pay hike. He hoped the money would help him finally afford his own place. For the moment, he was paying his mom, who was on disability, and his stepdad, who did not work, about $850 a month to live in his childhood bedroom. The money helped to cover their rent and the food stamps they lost due to Dustin’s income.

By this point in his life, Dustin had hoped to have moved out of his childhood bedroom. Shortly after high school he left Bradford in search of a better life in Maine, where he had helped a family from his church start a new congregation. He had considered going to college to become a pastor. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, and it felt meaningful,” he said. But he did not have the money for school and fell out with his church. Lately, he said he felt as if he was “just kind of floating.”

On this day, floating meant grabbing a few hours of sleep, playing video games and then heading back to the mill around 4 p.m. to take his friends home. They tossed their helmets and lunch pails in his car’s trunk. The smell of sawdust clung to their clothes and filled Dustin’s car. One of his friends was complaining about the job, which required them to stand in one spot for 10 hours a day lifting and stacking wooden boards.

“Ugh, the repetition,” he said. “It just repeats and repeats and repeats.”

“You gotta look at it a different way,” Dustin countered. “It stinks because it is the same thing every day. Yeah, it’s boring. But it’s a good paycheck, and they treat you with respect and like a human being.”

Former McDonald's employees Dustin Snyder, left, and RJ Schmidt, 19, head home after work.

Most of the workers in Dustin’s section had been at the mill for only a couple of months, and Dustin attributed the heavy turnover to the tedious nature of the job. He tried to fight off the boredom, as best he could, by asking questions about the different kinds of wood they processed and how the different machines worked. He chatted up the fork lift driver who had been at the mill for almost three decades and was making $30 an hour. If he could just make it to three months, Dustin knew he would qualify for a $300 bonus, a 401(k) and health insurance — something he had been without for more than three years.

“It’s super easy,” he said of the lifting and stacking. “You barely move.” The downside was the monotony, which was numbing in a way that McDonald’s had never been.

Weeks passed and Dustin found it hard to stop thinking about his old job. He missed the friendships he’d built at the restaurant. He missed the challenge and satisfaction that came with helping his intellectually disabled workers master a task. He missed being a leader.

When Dustin ran into one of the McDonald’s Sunday regulars, who gathered at a back table to gossip and complain about their shrinking pensions, he quizzed him about service at the restaurant. The man grumbled about the rising price of coffee and the “haughty” new staff at the restaurant.

“We didn’t get paid enough,” Dustin replied, “but we tried to treat you well.”

Whenever Dustin passed the McDonald’s, he would take note of the number of cars lined up at the drive-through. “I think they’re losing customers,” he would often say.

About six weeks after the walkout, Dustin noticed that the owner had changed the sign on the restaurant’s marquee. “Hiring starting at $10,” it now read.

The 75-cent raise was all that he and his staff had really wanted and all that they had been fighting for. But, to Dustin, it still felt like a “slap in the face.” His former bosses seemed to be sending him a message that their fight was never really about pay. It was about status and power and proving to Dustin and the others that, despite their modest gains and whatever changes might be taking place in the U.S. economy, they were still replaceable.

Dustin did not regret the walkout. He had “refused to bow down to the big scary corporation,” he said. He had rallied his friends and helped them find similar work at higher pay. Dustin’s lumber mill job would do for now. Maybe the meaning he had been searching for would come later.