..and that does not mean sitting around wasting ones life, bored, with nothing to do and no prospects. It means having those minutes, hours, days and years of ones life to discover and pursue the thing that each person holds dear.
And yes I'm misusing the dictionary definition of leisure time - to a purpose - we should be defending our time, not buying into the republican framing (framing expertly captured here by Mark Sumner) that owning ones own time on this earth needs to be justified or proven through hardship. Hardship that is built into the GOP's platform as a rule
I'm not sure where the expression "hard work makes life sweet" got corrupted but it did. Maybe Puritanical extremism that tapped into and exploited our million year old lizard brain survival instincts that once ruled us is at play. Lacking an agenda that can survive reason, it is what the republicans are best at (limited to - that is). I can't be sure and in today's world, and for the purpose of this diary don't much care how it began. I do however care how the party of the 1%ers have used this work ethic guilt argument and reversed the purpose to be used as a weapon; spending years to justify and codify into law(s) its one sidedness to divide and continue conquering the 99% of those that aren't owners of enough wealth to insulate themselves from this kind of economic subjugation
Hard work should be sweet. And it almost always is when each person has the time and freedom to discover what they love to do.
Iow's "Time flies when you having fun". Yes, both working and playing. That feeling when you've accomplished something that in following years you stop for a moment to remember, or even take a second look at just to get that - "I built that and it is a really good thing that I built" - feeling. It can be anything well done. Anything at all. A song written. A repair of something. Anything.
I had a job cutting all the main beams and rafters on a house that required using a framing square and my trusty "blue book" and Swanson speed square to calculate the seat cuts, bird's mouth, rafter angles, and plumb cuts etc. for the joints created in the lumber to fit tightly together as the finished exposed product. These were 6" x 14" glu-lams and it makes me feel good every time I see how they've aged over time.
Nowadays though we've been sold the idea that leisure time is bad. Pounded into our minds year after year by a tiny minority that harness our labor to meet their own needs without paying either the fair price in wages nor the real cost and clean-up of extracting our natural resources.
A con spread by "supply side" organizations like the white supremacist (Rachel Maddow video) Heritage Foundation and the "conservative" Ecomomist, that to own, preserve and cherish more of ones own life is something to be ashamed of in some way, and that it is un-American not to be sufficiently grateful to our "betters"
Despite the great many technological advances and thoroughly documented increases in worker productivity that were supposed to make life better, with more free time, we're heading in the opposite direction and people are accepting this as the new norm.
Why?
We've all heard the negative Reaganesque "lazy...blah blah blah" slurs so I won't repeat them. Even Progressives/liberal Dems have been driven into the position of defense against this national/Global idea lie, that "we built that" means ones life has to be a grind and that we should be proud to have given our entire lives to a job we do not care about as a sacrifice for the betterment of society, (society as it has become defined by and that "belongs" to those who have accrued/ "own" the most).
So instead of allowing the "conservatives" to spin leisure time into a negative where any defense of it is considered promoting sloth, let it be known what should be the most natural result of our work and our progress while simultaneously exposing the betrayal of the "conservative" movement GOP for systematically severing the link(s) between that progress and we the people that made it happen with their failed trickle down economic concoction that has 'Screwed the American worker for the last 50 years' charted out @ link)
Real freedom and that means benefitting from what we the people built. The freedom to have our voice, our government as the vehicle to invest in more jobs than there are workers to do them (because in reality there will always be more that needs doing than there are people to it), so that each person has more choices, not less including time off for each person to spend as they see fit.
So I do question this trend or whatever it is and suggest that when private corporations and big businesses need the peoples labor they must compete for our labor at our price not the other way around as it is today and worsening
Owning the right to more of ones time on this earth.
Because if this inequality in life becomes the new norm, the price is too high
- time to turn in, be back later on today - Thank you