The ad in the airline magazine shows a young boy on a swing, the backdrop for an interactive pager being held by a man's hands. "Maybe you don't have to send an e-mail right now," says BellSouth's ad for their interactive paging service. "But isn't it cool that you can?" The ad, with its headline of work@lifespeed, celebrates a world where our jobs engulf our every waking moment.
It's not just our workplaces. Our lives in general seem faster, more complicated, more at the mercy of distant powers and principalities. We have less time for our families, and less room to ask where we want to go as a society and as a planet. The very pace of environmental crises, global economic shifts and the threats of war and terrorism make it harder to address them. If we're to act effectively as engaged citizens, we're going to have to slow down our lives, our culture, and a world that seems to be
careening out of control.
People talk of these pressures wherever I go. "I'd like to be more involved in my community," they say, "to take a stand on important issues. "But I just don't have the time." I hear this from low-wage workers holding two jobs to make ends meet, from professionals working late nights and
weekends, for students beleaguered by outside jobs and debt. It's true for all of us stretched between escalating workplace demands and a sense that we'll never catch up on everything else we have to do, much less change a culture that keeps us scrambling, as if in Alice in Wonderland world, simply to keep
from falling further behind.
The pace and length of the working week was once the central issue in the labor movement. In 1791, carpenters struck for the ten-hour day, challenging employers who paid flat daily wages during the long summer shifts and then switched to piecework during the shorter winter days. A movement to make
this a universal standard grew throughout the nineteenth century, in response to the 70-hour weeks of America's new industrial enterprises.
By the 1860s, the labor movement made the eight-hour day its central focus, with marches, rallies, and related political campaigns. A hundred thousand New York City workers, mostly in the building trades, struck and won this right in 1872, followed by other workers, industry by industry, like the
printers in 1906 and the steelworkers in 1923. Finally, in 1940, Roosevelt instituted the universal 40-hour week, with mandatory overtime when employers exceeded it. The workers who won these changes fought for time with their families, but also for time to educate themselves and act as
citizens. And then the debate over the pace and speed of life quietly stopped.
As Harvard economist Juliet Schor has examined, Americans' working hours have been steadily increasing for the past 30 years. Between 1969 and 1987 alone, paid employment by the average American worker jumped by over 160 hours per year, or the equivalent of an entire extra month on the job. We now work the equivalent of nearly nine weeks more a year than our European
counterparts.
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... we are also seeing the beginnings of a citizen activism that combines new approaches, like online organizing, with traditional grassroots outreach. Emails easily overload, as our inboxes pile up with disturbing news and urgent action calls. We feel lucky just to keep up with the flow. Yet the strength of the new worldwide peace movement or the movements against corporate globalization would be inconceivable without electronic networks to pass on talking points, articles, fliers, posters, summaries of key documents, and information on ways to protest. In the process these movements have also raised critical issues about how ordinary citizens can slow the pace of critical global decisions enough to ensure that they're wise.
The very speed of our electronic communications also makes more intimate kinds of connections more necessary. We need the visible human presence of public vigils and protests, and the step-by-step outreach that happens when we discuss major public issues in churches, temples, PTAs, city council
meetings, Rotary Clubs, college and high school campuses, and with coworkers, neighbors, and friends. While electronic discussions can foster surprisingly productive dialogue, they work best as an adjunct to face-to-face conversation and community, and not a replacement for it. People still need to gather together, eat, joke, flirt, tell their stories, attach names to faces, and remind themselves why they joined their causes to begin with. "It's almost reassuring that we still have to do all the traditional things if we want people to respond," says a software editor who chairs her local Amnesty International chapter, "not just rely on the new technologies."
America's dominant culture makes speed an ultimate virtue, as if simply by moving faster we can overcome all obstacles, including our own mortality. Yet as Milan Kundera writes, "there is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting." Challenging the increased pace of
work and of change may require slowing down our own lives. Even in our activism we might remind ourselves that we're in it for the long haul, however difficult the times. We need time to play with our children, read a book, go to a movie, dance to good music, or soak in the bathtub and do nothing. If our causes call for more, and they always will, we can find other people to participate, or take on fewer projects. One way or another we need to stop before we're so spent and bitter, that we feel no choice
but to withdraw permanently from the fray. "You can't solve all the world's problems," longtime labor and environmental activist Hazel Wolf reminded me on the eve of her 100th birthday. "You have to guard against taking on more than you can do and burning out with frustration. But you can take on one project at a time, and then another. You can do that your entire life."
It's tempting to respond to the speed of all that we face with a short-term politics of our own, reacting on issue after issue, as we try to prevent further incursions on human dignity by a culture that would place every value on a global auction block. We can keep our eyes on the prize by drawing strength from what we fight to preserve, and thinking about the world we'd like to see. We can tell the stories at the core of complex issues, so lives and communities can't simply be dismissed as expendable barriers to progress. We can raise enough root questions so we do more than challenge particular abuses of power, but offer a broader alternative.
For most of us, our community activism will inevitably be squeezed into whatever hours we have remaining after we earn what we need to get by. For over half a century, these hours have been diminishing, as our work takes over more and more of our lives. If we can begin reversing this, we'll have more time to heal the real wounds of our communities, of our nation, and of the world. We fight for bread and roses, in the words of old union song--not only for survival, but for the beauty and richness that makes life worthwhile. We fight as well for the right to be citizens, for the chance
to create a democracy where all can participate.
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This is an excerpt from a longer article, "Time to Act", by Paul Loeb, author of Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time . A version of the Full Article, will appear in Experience Life magazine and in the forthcoming book Take Back Your Time (Publishers). The article is intended as a complement to the events of the Oct 24 Take Back Your Time Day. You can find more information on this project at
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