Category Archives: Greatest Generation, Boomers, Millennials, Alphabets

The Abandonment of Rest

We long ago abandoned a weekly day of rest. Now we’re tossing out those few days of national rest like Thanksgiving.

Not everyone has family to be with on Thanksgiving, of course. Now they can go to the mall. One woman I knew without family, however, volunteered at a hospital to take the place of those who did have families. Others still work in soup kitchens or deliver Thanksgiving meals to those unable to afford them. Soup kitchens are a growth industry these days. The patrons are less likely to have resources for mall consumerism.

Of course, those with no or part-time jobs may be glad of the chance for more work. I used to say you could determine the gap between well-off Americans and those not so blessed by visiting a store open on a lesser holiday, say Columbus Day. The store workers tended to be hourly workers without benefits. The customers tended to have paid holidays and sick leave and health coverage.

We have less time now for friends or family, and anyway, the nuclear family appears to be going the way of the extended family. No time to ponder or mediate or read or take walks, either.

However, as some of us frantically shop earlier and later and longer on our paid holidays, others are forced to backtrack. Younger people stay longer with their parents, and grandparents move in to help with childcare. Those with no work or lesser hours now have the luxury of time. Perhaps we are forced into a time of rest to compensate for those days of rest we previously forfeited.

Treasures to Keep and Trash to Toss

The route of the pioneers heading westward was strewn with tossed possessions to lighten loads. Items valued by them in the beginning of their journeys proved burdensome as they progressed. To survive, they learned new ways of doing things as well. They built sod houses instead of log, for example, because timber was scarce, not like where they had come from.

On the other hand, certain skills learned in the past continued to serve them: hard work, honesty, and a willingness to listen to new ideas.

How well do we adapt to change? Do we recognize the need for change when it comes? Can we jettison outmoded mind sets without losing core values?

For example, employment patterns have changed drastically in the U.S. as rapidly developing countries like India and China prove their ability to produce quality goods and services once reserved for developed economies.

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/67874/michael-spence/globalization-and-unemployment

In order to retain our ability to compete, we must, we are told, develop a more educated work force. Thus, we must spend more resources on education and training and less on personal consumption like houses and cars and entertainment. This requires an emphasis on the ago-old virtue of giving up present pleasure for future gain.

Buying Time

Normally we swap time for money in this country. Given the choice between working more hours for a higher salary or taking more time off with less pay, we are likely to choose longer working hours. Americans are famous for hard work and an entrepreneurial spirit. We average shorter vacations and a higher age at retirement than most developed countries.

Once gender barriers to jobs were unhooked, women, married or not, with or without children, entered the work force in large numbers. This shift allowed many women the chance for career fulfilment that they couldn’t enjoy previously. For others, it simply meant more money.

As paid work for all adults became the norm, the media probed unintended consequences.

http://www.economist.com/node/15174418?story_id=15174418

Articles chronicled worker dissatisfaction with the lack of time for families. Other casualties included those who wanted time to pursue creative or civic or charitable activities but lacked the time for it because of their jobs.

Some corporations and government entities experiment with programs that allow workers more time to pursue other interests. Changes include greater leave time, working at home, and staggered job hours. Ultimately, however, we ourselves must choose the role that careers, and especially money, will play in our lives.

http://scribblingsfromexile.blogspot.com/2011/03/career-and-choice-no-one-size-fits-all.html

Perhaps as the country deals with necessary changes after the end of past high flying years, less money (but stable employment and benefits) and more time off might be a good bargain. We could begin to live within our means, scale down credit buying, and spend time with people other than our office colleagues.

The Parent Divide

We played board games today, a young family and I; father, mother, and two elementary school-aged children. Games are a favorite past time with them. From games, the children have learned skills: fair play, mental and physical dexterity, waiting their turn, and honesty, even if it means they lose sometimes.

Before the girls learned to read, their parents daily read stories to them. Now they enjoy reading for themselves, which carries over into both the pleasure of losing themselves in a good book and into academic skills. They sometimes write stories of their own.

Other activities fill their lives: sports, church, visits with friends, and sometimes travel to a new place.

I’ve heard of the digital divide, the advantages of children who grow up with computers versus those who don’t. While watching that family today, I thought of the parent divide. I wish all children had the advantages these have: parents who love each other, love their children, and take responsibility for raising them.

Surely, the most important task in the world for parents, relatives, and communities is personal nurture of the young. How well does our current culture encourage this work?

A Sure-Fire Way to Beat Obesity

The article in the Sunday paper dealt with obesity, especially the growing evidence of obesity among American children. It outlined efforts toward healthier eating habits: more healthy foods in schools, more fresh produce in lower income neighborhoods, and more emphasis on exercise.

Though such efforts appear to have limited success at present, backers hope that over time success may accumulate. They point to the time it took before the anti-smoking campaigns led to a significant drop in the number of Americans who smoke. This may well be true.

The sure-fire way to lose extra pounds, as we all know, is to eat less unhealthy foods (most of us know what they are) and eat more healthy foods (we know what these are, too) and to exercise more. Lack of knowledge and the ability to obtain healthy foods are not the major problems. Certainly, medical personnel should be aware of the facts. Walk into most hospitals, however, and notice the vending machine offerings: heavily geared toward fats and sweets.

An alcoholic feels miserable when first deprived of the substance that wrecks his life. The same with the smoker who first abstains from nicotine. We eat unhealthy foods because they give us more pleasure than the healthy foods which would benefit us. Exercise, which also benefits us, means giving up other activities that we judge more fun.

The idea of giving up present pleasure for future benefits appears to have escaped us lately. Witness the burden we now carry because we bought on credit rather than saving for houses, cars, and baubles. Witness the broken relationships because we were unable to remain faithful in our marriages. Witness the number of unmarried young who unintentionally become parents because they, in the best tradition of their parents, choose an immediate pleasure, an intimacy better reserved for mature, committed relationships.

What the Apostle Paul, Johnny Cash, and C.S. Lewis Taught Me

Christians sometimes seal themselves off from the arts, the sciences, academia, and other pursuits not overtly religious. The apostle Paul did not shut himself off from culture; he invaded it. He went to Athens and spoke to pagan philosophers and thinkers about their altar to an unknown God.

When country music singer Johnny Cash died in 2003, Time Magazine ran a special report on “The Man in Black.” Cash would never have been so well known for his Christian faith if he hadn’t first become a great musician.

C.S. Lewis is quoted as saying, “We don’t need more Christian writers. We need more great writers who are Christian.”

Christians must prepare to compete in the marketplace and academia and the public sphere. We must strive to be among the best.

Christians may rail against much that they see in today’s society, but such admonition is useless to a non-Christian who sees Christians as being mostly against things he has no problem with. We may not agree with today’s standards of right and wrong, but, for many reasons , the Christian world view is no longer the dominant one in our culture.

In the past, we’ve had a lot of hangers-on when it was popular to be a Christian. Now the hangers-on are leaving.

Christians now will be respected for who they are rather than what they say.

Finding Community on a Bus

I read a news article a while back about a popular bus route in the city of Seattle. Passengers, the article said, enjoy the mix of nationalities and languages and the diversity of those riding with them on that particular bus.

We encourage the use of mass transit, of getting people out of their cars, by appeals to environmentalism and the greater good. How would the appeal of community play?

The car is the ultimate expression of our individuality. In the process, we’ve lost much of our togetherness. As home foreclosures, job layoffs, and a generally depressed economy cut into our resources to buy the latest automobile, perhaps the local bus may become a symbol of finding community again.

Feminism—Islamic Style

Isobel Coleman, in an article in the Foreign Service Journal, writes about Islamic feminists. In countries like Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, these women attempt to show that a reasoned approach to their religion, Islam, can open up possibilities for women and girls in conservative Muslim-majority countries.
http://www.afsa.org/FSJ/0411/index.html#/28/

Sometimes these women shy away from the term “feminist” because of the cultural Western baggage such a label carries. Whereas Western feminists generally have ignored religion, Islamic feminists tend to use their religion. They bring to their religious leaders passages in Islam’s Quran and suggest new interpretations. They see their religious inheritance as an ally.

One wonders how different the “cultural wars” in our society would have been if those who have sought change (often needed change) in the past few decades had begun with our religious inheritance instead of discarding it.

They might have dwelt on Paul’s words in Galatians 3:28: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” (NRSV) For starters.

Not Your Grandmother’s Church

The Seattle Times recently posted an article in their weekly magazine, Pacific Northwest, titled “Artistic & Religious.” The article highlighted groups where “creative Christians are taking down the walls between faith and art.” Some gather in coffee houses and pubs, others in private houses.

We hear predictions that Christianity will be dead within a generation. Groups such as these in Seattle and other places indicate that Christians are finding new ways to express their faith, not dying away. This pattern has persisted since the first gentile Christian churches grew out of gatherings of Jewish Christian believers.

Christians are, as Jesus said, in the world but not of it. In other words, we are exiles, refugees of a sort (a theme of this blog). The constant task for our communities is to engage with the changing world, not stagnate within yesterday’s structures.

We all know that a world of Facebook and twitter requires us to incorporate new technology. Even more, we must relate to an America in which the fastest growing religious preference is “no preference.” By contrast, Christianity grows rapidly in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

Christianity is indeed a world religion, as it has never been before. We must learn the vocabulary of today’s world, of both America and the countries beyond our borders.

Easter Under the Radar

I regularly check lists of writers’ conferences. One, I noticed recently, takes place on Easter weekend. Apparently Easter is no longer relevant to many Americans, just another weekend.

Then I remembered when I lived in Muslim-majority countries. Easter passed pretty much unobserved there, too. During my first Easter in such a country, a broadcast from an Easter service in another part of the world inspired me before I left for the day’s work (the weekends there were Thursday and Friday, not Saturday and Sunday). I felt kinship with the early Christians.

The pastor of my childhood church used to say he should wish Merry Christmas as well as Happy Easter to the congregation. So many on Easter, he said, only came on that Sunday, so he would not see them for a full year.

When Easter was a more or less national celebration, the day was coopted by the Easter bunny and chocolate eggs and spring fashions. Perhaps it is well that we have fewer “cultural” Christians on Easter now and that our present society limits the celebration of that wondrous event to those who actually ponder its meaning.

Career and Choice: No One Size Fits All

I recently enjoyed a novel by Lauraine Snelling, No Distance Too Far, about a woman doctor in the early twentieth century. She faced difficulties in her profession in part because she was female. Fortunately, women now are more free to use their vocational gifts.

In fact, over half the labor force in the United States is now female. However, as we more or less expect all adults to become paid workers, problems develop. Articles in The Economist and The New York Times touch on these issues. We have less time for other activities: relationships with family and friends; care of our children, the sick, and the aging; volunteer work; physical exercise that keeps us fit; and creative work that fulfils us but doesn’t pay the bills. We are reminded of the survival mode of earlier times when all except a few elites labored during every waking hour.

Returning to the days of gender inequality is not an option. Also, those struggling simply to stay afloat in these times don’t have much choice but to continue. Some of us, however, can consider new work models, perhaps leading to wider discussion about our career-oriented world. Why not new patterns for the times in which we now live?

Part time work as a choice? Working at home for a period of one’s career? (More of a possibility because of the Internet.) Job sharing? And if a woman has the option to be a traditional stay-at-home wife and mother and chooses this path, we can support her in her choice.

What If Schools Were Marketed As Entertainment?

Do I understand correctly? Football players and owners are in negotiations over revenue sharing and profits. Figures bandied about are in the billions.

At the same time, teachers are being laid off in cities and towns all over the country. We don’t have the money to pay them.

I’m not suggesting anything is wrong with sports (although we would be healthier if we played them instead of watching from our living room couches). After all, the apostle Paul used sports metaphors in his letters and appeared to be knowledgeable about the games of the day.

Nor am I suggesting that all teachers are competent, wise, dedicated, and worthy of employment (though most of us can name teachers of high caliber who influenced us). Certainly, issues like seniority versus performance are matters for debate.

It does seem ironic, though, that we produce gobs of money for entertainment while skimping on investment in our children.

The West and the Rest

My childhood church supported a missionary family in Nigeria. This relationship first stoked my interest in places beyond the Christianity that I knew in America. Now, after sojourns in countries vastly different from my own, I believe the need grows for American Christians to learn even more about the non-Western world.

The phrase “the West and the rest” became popular following the publication in 1996 by Samuel P. Huntington of The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order. Richard K. Betts discussed this book and two others in an article in Foreign Affairs magazine

Betts states: “The sacred concepts of freedom, individualism, and cooperation are so ingrained in U.S. political culture that most people assume them to be the natural order of things, universal values that people everywhere would embrace if given the chance.”

We no longer can make such assumptions, if we ever could. Best that Christians grow in understanding of the changed world we live in, one that may not be as respectful of our ideals as in the past. We may have to work harder to prove the worth of those ideals.

BFF Electronically

Fax machines became popular about the time I served in my first working assignment overseas in the early 1990’s for the U.S. Department of State. My family, friends, and I enthusiastically embraced the ability to communicate without the necessity for waiting on physical mail.

Before I left my last overseas assignment, we delighted in email and cheaper long distance telephone service. Cell phones were coming into popular use. We shopped “online” with our credit cards, eliminating time-consuming orders of clothes and other merchandise by mail and check (though we still had to wait for the packages to arrive in the traditional way).

Social networking appeared after I returned to the U.S., but I’m well aware of its potential to enhance long distance relationships. Instant communication with the whole family? Close friends that you only see every year or so? Marvelous!

Further additions to the electronic menu multiply so fast that spell checkers can’t keep up with them. Texting and blogs allow for instant communication with like-minded individuals. We interact and let the world know our opinions.

I do have one concern. What if our electronic networking becomes a substitute rather than an enhancement of face-to-face interaction? The word “friends” has become corrupted. Facebook and Twitter are often used as tools for advertising rather than sharing.

Anything I write on the “walls” of my “friends” I sift through a filter: How much of my inner self should be broadcast to the world? Communicating the depths of my soul? Maybe not.

Social networking allows us instant interaction with multitudes. Like many blessings, if used wisely, it serves us well. It has the potential to dilute our relationships, however, if it becomes a substitute for the intimacy of face-to-face sharing.

Oil Gushers and Community

I just looked at the news to find that the Gulf Coast oil gusher still pours its ooze into the water.

While blaming British Petroleum for the catastrophe, one person suggested that Americans also might consider curbing their oil addiction. Lots of luck. I’m not sure black-gummed marine animals, despoiled beaches, and destroyed livelihoods will do the trick. So far, the only thing that caused us to drive less was when gasoline sold for four dollars a gallon. I’m sorry for those who suffered as a result of our changed habits, such as gas station and motel owners, but is less driving in itself a reason to mourn?

When I worked overseas, I would come home and marvel at the increasingly clogged freeways, the new malls, where before cows had chewed their cud in pastures, and, of course, more housing developments further and further out in the hinterlands. To my mind, the automobile had morphed from symbol of independent individualism to enslaver.

That which made us independent now constricts our choices. Children no longer can walk safely to school, to a friend’s house, or to a movie. They must be driven. The elderly must sit home alone or be warehoused into senior citizen dwellings of varying degrees of comfort when they lose the ability to drive even to the store for groceries. The less well-off, not being able to give up limited resources to buy and maintain a car, must content themselves with whatever jobs are accessible by walking or mass transit.

If the economic downturn ends, shall we return to building another super highway, another mall, swap another farm for development? More than the environment is at stake. We don’t know our neighbors. How could we? We have no time. Our commutes grow ever longer. A car in the shop for repairs is a nightmare. We can’t even buy a loaf of bread without it, let alone pick up the children from after school daycare.

In some of the other countries where I lived, walking was the main form of transportation, supplemented perhaps by a bus. I noticed people out and about, however, children on the way to school, the elderly sitting and keeping an eye on things. Small businesses catered to their walking customers.

We might think about it. Have we given up a precious commodity for the luxury of stewing in traffic jams? Or have we decided that community is optional, but the car is not?

Ann Gaylia O'Barr

Culture and World Events from a Christian Perspective