Disney been berry berry good to me

Combine America's native love of egalitarianism and the decline in respect for service jobs, and you have some very uncomfortable tourists at times. "Guest workers" are recruited from 62 countries and without exception the ones we encountered were friendly and helpful. They were also segregated. The ship's officers were, with one exception, white males, usually from Europe. The staff at the Oceaneer Lab and Club, judging by their pictures in the programs, were Europeans and Americans, with a few from South America thrown in. The wait staff was pretty much across the board, our waiters from India, and our room steward from the Philippines.

I was never made to feel uncomfortable, but I was anyway, and had to devote some time chasing my tail to logically hash it out.

First, the master/sahib relationship. I was much too aware that, even as one who was aboard only because of my son's lucky choice at a contest, as the son of a grey-collar steel worker and, by salary, firmly in the lower middle-class, I enjoy a far higher standard of living than the Indonesian worker in the restaurant whose country's economy tanked, where if you couldn't find a job, you spent your free time hunting down with machetes members of another tribe who the government moved onto your lands to relieve the population pressures.

OTOH, the guilt I was feeling was based more on money than on any vestigial notion of racial superiority. I have it; they don't. The wait staff and steward work for tips, so they're motivated to give me excellent service, and I'm obliged to express my appreciation by coming across with a bit of the ready at voyage's end. That's a simple transaction.

But the situation is complicated by the fact that, emotionally, we were far more attached to them than they were to us. Yes, I know they are trained to push our affection buttons and keep the tips coming. But I liked my steward, who endeared himself to my family by turning a towel into an elephant (and borrowing my clip-on sunglasses I had left behind), and I liked the two waiters who helped us by amusing the kids. Knowing that they had four tables to work each serving; and that eight families were getting the exact same treatment on this four-day cruise, didn't change things.

Guest worker programs are nothing new, nor are run solely by Americans who need someone to run the convenience stores, dry-cleaners and inner-city groceries. The Saudis and Kuwaitis import their poorer cousins to do the work they don't want. Same with the Japanese, whose major guest-worker program we called World War II. Before I find myself boarding the liberal guilt trip faster than you can say John Lindsey, I have to remind myself that even we lower middle-class Americans forget that there are far worse jobs to perform than working for tips on a cruise line. And I'd better do it fast, before Dennis Miller slaps me with a plagiarism suit.

Of course, that's just my opinion. I may be wrong.

All material is ©2000-2001 Bill Peschel unless otherwise noted.