Opinion: We're Polite, Not Grateful. There's a Difference

During Spring Family Weekend, my English class held a parent-student symposium on Helena Maria Viramontes’s novel Under the Feet of Jesus. This novel explores the life of Estrella, a child who tries to navigate life as the daughter of migrant farmworkers in the Central Valley of California. The book is unforgiving to its characters and their circumstances. They wake before dawn, working under the blazing sun, and fight for basic human dignities that, by virtue of their availability, Deerfield students don’t have to think about: shelter, a meal, and the ability to remain in one place. We spent the entire class discussing the characters’ difficulties and resilience, and what the novel demands of its readers.

Then, a parent in the room made a point that stuck with me.

The parent pointed out that we’d been talking about the difficulty of undervalued labor as if it were something that exists far away from Deerfield, as if it were happening on the farms of California, at another time, to people who were completely different from us. Underappreciated labor, they remarked, isn’t just about the farmworker. Underappreciated labor is the condition of the nurse, the janitor, the groundskeeper, and all the people who help run this entire institution.

I have been thinking about that comment ever since.

There is a certain kind of invisibility that becomes attached to competent and consistent labor. Consider the person working in the Greer, who knows your name by heart. Or the groundskeeper who does their job so well that you have never once had to think about walking through snow on your way to class. Or the custodian who cleans the dorm bathrooms quietly, without interruption or acknowledgement. These are not trivial things. They fundamentally support our daily lives and deserve recognition.

I have walked past many of these people and said “hello” or “thank you,” but that was it. They would typically offer a warm smile and greet me back, and nothing further would be exchanged between us. In some way, that always bothered me, though I couldn’t quite explain why.

It bothered me because I began to realize how little I actually knew about them. I see the same custodians every time I wake up late and slip into the bathroom during first period; they are already there, changing the soap, scrubbing surfaces, making sure the space is clean and functional. The people who handle our laundry. The security guards who are always present when I go to pick up a package or a DoorDash order cheerfully ask, “How is your day going?” with enthusiasm that sometimes makes me feel quietly ashamed of my own. These people have families, histories, stories about where and how they grew up, full lives that exist entirely outside the narrow sliver of them that we ever see. Yet, at Deerfield, we often see only that sliver. Sometimes not even that.

Let me be very clear about what this article is not. It is not an indictment. Most of the students here at Deerfield are very polite and nice to people who work for the school. We open doors, we say thank you, and we are considerate. If you were to survey the members of the maintenance and dining hall departments, you would likely find that Deerfield students are, by and large, decent and well-mannered. 

However, I do believe that kindness and gratitude are different things and that, without quite realizing it, we have begun to confuse the two.

True gratitude requires active recognition. It demands the acknowledgment, on a conscious level, of the labor and care that shape the conditions of our lives. Gratitude is not just holding a door. Gratitude is actively registering what you receive and from whom you receive it. I would claim that such attentiveness to surroundings is structurally hard to maintain at a place such as Deerfield.

Consider the basic conditions of daily life here. We wake up in heated dormitories; we take walks along paths, some of them heated, already cleared of snow before we get out of bed; we eat food prepared by kitchen staff who come to work well before the dining hall opens. People, we will never meet, clean our classrooms, repair our equipment, and maintain our common rooms, a labor performed so efficiently that we never have to think about it. It doesn’t happen out of nowhere; it’s the result of active labor by actual people, people who, by virtue of their efficiency, are often invisible to us.

The issue is not a simple absence of gratitude. Gratitude, in this context, is not merely a feeling but a conscious choice to recognize and appreciate what others do for you and who is doing it. The deeper problem is that comfort has become so permanent a feature of life at Deerfield that it no longer registers as comfort at all. We are not grateful for air. When something has always been there, we stop perceiving it as a gift. Viramontes understood this. Estrella moves through the world with a kind of fierce, exhausting attentiveness. She notices everything, cataloguing each discomfort and each small mercy with equal precision because nothing in her life is guaranteed. That heightened awareness is the direct product of precarity. She sees clearly because she cannot afford not to. 

We are not in a position of precarity. I am not saying that we need to wish for it, but I wonder whether it’s possible to acquire the kind of vision Estrella has without going through the hardship first, if it’s possible to be aware of the surrounding world without forcing ourselves into a position where we need to be hyper-aware.

I am not sure what the answer is. But, I do believe that the question matters.

I do not think the solution is reminding yourself to thank the next person you pass in the hallway. This type of prescriptive gratitude is not optimal; it transforms a human relationship into a transaction, a box to check on the way to feel like a considerate person. The gesture becomes about the giver, not the recipient. And an act of gratitude that is primarily about the person performing it is, in some ways, not gratitude at all. The type of gratitude I believe we need is something harder: a sustained practice of attention towards the labor that surrounds us, a genuine desire to see those who take care of us, and to resist the ease of not seeing them.

The education that is offered to Deerfield students is unparalleled in the world today. Part of that education should be, in my view, learning to see the whole picture of labor, of the people who get here before we wake up, stay here after we fall asleep, who work tirelessly to provide us with opportunities. Those people aren’t just background; they are the ones who make Deerfield possible; they are the foundation of our community.

In the end, Under the Feet of Jesus has no comfortable resolution. Estrella’s life remains harsh and unfulfilled. Viramontes doesn’t give her readers the pleasure of an easy ending. There is a certain honesty in this; she doesn’t give us an excuse. Following her example, I want to be clear that this is not an article with a clear call to action. It is an invitation to sit with a question that I have not fully answered myself: when everything is given to you, how do you learn to actually see it?

I do not know. But I think the asking of it is where we begin.