Our work force is not the one of our parents. It now includes not only many mothers, but also fathers with a realization that they, too, want to share in their children’s lives. It includes singles who crave a life beyond work. It includes care givers with family members in need of attention. It includes those with a desire to take time off for a temporary stint with a non-profit or to gain more education or to experiment with new career directions.
Employers will profit by understanding that employees cannot always be only employees. Workers will shift goals when a new child is born or a parent needs extra care or a spouse suffers grave medical problems or one’s goals change. If the norm is for most adults to concern themselves with a career from the time they leave school until they retire, we need new patterns to balance our lives.
Long leaves should be expected from time to time. This doesn’t mean employers should be on the hook for long periods of salary payments when the employee isn’t working. It does mean an acceptance of the fact that workers will at times need extended periods of leave, even perhaps several years. The promise of reinstatement when the employee is ready to reenter the work force, within limits, as well as the continuation of medical benefits are items of consideration. Flex time or part-time work or work from home are possibilities in some careers.
The employees, too, must make choices. They cannot expect continued salary for long periods if they leave the work force for an extended time. The American habits of high consumption and low savings need drastic revision. Americans should expect not to work at certain periods in their lives and plan accordingly.
We need a rethinking of career. Taking time off from career for other needs should be the new normal, a normal of choice.
As a consular officer working for the U.S. State Department, I interviewed foreign nationals for both temporary visas and visas for permanent residence in the United States. Interviews for legal immigration were rewarding, often dealing with those who were elated at reaching their dream of living in the United States. These immigrants often had family who had immigrated to the United States before them. Others had earned their visas because their job skills were needed by an American employer.
Confucius, the oft-quoted Chinese teacher and philosopher said, “To put the world in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order; we must cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right.”
We are told that the only way we can come out of the recession is for Americans to spend the greater part of their salaries on goods and services, even go into debt. Especially on Black Friday, retailers count on the greatest spending spree by Americans of the entire year. If accounts don’t reach into the black on that day, retailers foresee trouble.
This gap between the parented and the unparented has increased since the famous baby boom following World War II. The boom gave way to other generations, born from the mid-1960’s onward. These groups are variously called Generation X, Generation Y (also known as the Millennials), and Generation Z. Until the economic recession that began around 2008, these children were born during an era of unprecedented economic growth, of the two-career family, of the housing boom.
Such was the case with the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Ratified in 1919, it prohibited intoxicating beverages. A backlash against it, however, led to its repeal in 1933. Too many people made “bathtub” gin or bought bootleg liquor (leading to an increase in organized crime) for the amendment to work.
My memory of his brief appearance in American history as the candidate against Richard Nixon mostly concerned his stunning defeat. McGovern took the electoral votes only of Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.
Richard Nixon became the president remembered for his resignation because of the Watergate scandal. McGovern, the loser, had spoken out against our military involvement in a small nation in Asia because he did not believe the country threatened us. Only later did so many others agree with him that Vietnam became a code word for failure.
The issue of chemical weapons hovers over the conflict. Bashar al-Assad has chemical weapons and has threatened to use them. No one doubts the brutality of the al-Assad famly. The father of Bashar massacred and obliterated the village of Hama in 1982 because of its opposition to his rule.
The literature wasn’t an intelligent discussion of a point of view, but epithet hurling diatribes.
Years later on an afternoon in Marseille, France, my husband and I searched for a place to eat. We had arrived in the French coastal city to spend one night before heading out early the next day on a ferry. It would take us across the Mediterranean to the historic city of Algiers.
Yes, in a couple of days we would climb the hill out of Algiers’ Casbah and follow the narrow streets into an uncertain future in that troubled land. But for the moment, the music calmed my anxieties and prepared me to cope with what lay ahead.
Their message is offensive to those who mourn loved ones. Courts in the U.S. have judged that the picketers have the right to protest even if their actions are scorned by the majority of Americans.
Otherwise reasonable people became too angry to discuss differences. Southerners cared more for their cotton economy and its slave labor than in justice. The North knew its own exploitation of immigrant labor, yet often saw itself as superior and worked from a position of self-righteousness in dealing with the slavery issue.