Over the break my son went away for a week, giving me ample time to re-arrange the house. You see, I needed to take a table and shelf from his room, and he wouldn't have liked it if I did while he was here. It made his room feel much bigger, and when he got home yesterday he mentioned how much he likes the new room configuration! Parents always know. Well, not really. Whatever.
I was thinking about work, teaching, unions, the current zeitgeist, school reform, the economy, racism, teabaggism, and other isms. As I thought I realized something--Americans work too hard.
Yup, we work too hard for too little. We work 8-10 hour days, most of us, with no time to live. We have to eat fast food because our schedules are packed. We miss our kid's school stuff because we can't take time off to raise our kids. We worry constantly about getting fired or laid off only to lose our health insurance and risk illness that can't be cured with bankruptcy. And all our work makes someone else rich, often at our expense. That sucks.
Why do we do it? The rich get richer and the rest of us get poorer. The rich own nearly everything, and we own nearly nothing. Why do we put up with it?
I wish every worker could make lunch at work. You know, a yummy, hot, nutritious lunch that we could eat leisurely. Wouldn't that be nice? And while we eat we could talk to one another. Maybe we could even grow to tolerate and care for each other. I don't know, but it seems life should be for living, not working. Work to live, not live to work.
America is pretty screwed up. But not because of most of us, rather, because of a few of us who are greedy beyond all comprehension.
Eat the rich.
