Top Ten - Top 10 Quotes Against Work - Top 10 - Charles Bukowski - Factotum - American Beauty - William Faulkner - American Movie - Aldous Huxley - Fight Club - Oscar Wilde - Goodfellas - Henry David Thoreau - Office Space(Fair Warning - I'm gonna ramble a bit here...)
Number 5:
"I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables—slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war . . . our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off."
—Fight Club, 1999
I encourage you to follow the link and read the rest of the quotes on that page- they're quite good. I'm thinking a lot about tribal values and modern society, about wealth and elitism, about what really matters and what we give our time to. Our ancestors lived in mostly egalitarian, matriarchal kinship groups. It took about 20 hours a week per person to accumulate or create enough food and shelter for the entire group, and everyone shared in the groups wealth, no matter how much or how little that might be. There was no sense of exchange or entitlement. It was just life, and people had the time to live it. They worked together for common goals, and sharing the work made it less tedious. There was time to give to the sick, the very young, the very old. Life was relatively stress free. I'm not romanticizing the past - modern scholars are finding that this is probably the way humans really lived. The idea that life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" comes from Thomas Hobbes, 1588-1679. Indeed, life in those days would have been just that. It was the height - or low point - of the patriarchy, with the Inquisitions in full bloom, plague sweeping through Europe over 100 times from the 1300s to the 1700s, killing 30 to 60 percent of the population because the people had moved into filthy, rat infested cities. The pandemics were a natural result of people living in the unnatural crowding of a dirty city.
We know now that patriarchy got its start in the Middle East when the formerly lush environment suddenly became a desert. Food was scarce then, but we're still living with the concept of scarcity in the wealthiest nation in the world. Our value system is derived from people who were starving to death. At that point in time, the biggest and strongest, the ones who could steal the most, were the ones that survived. As they began to prosper, their value system became entrenched in their cultures and religion. Conquest became the name of the game, and that included conquest over not just resources but people as well.
Oppression, slavery, rape, greed - these are all legacies of the desert madness that has informed the history of the planet for the last 6,000 years or so. It's time to let them go, and to realize that the Earth's resources belong to everyone. It's time to start acting like family again - to take care of the very young, very old, or the sick or disabled; to share what we have in a fair way that leaves no one in desperate need; to make government work for everyone. We produce enough! We just aren't spreading it around effectively.
I'm not saying no one should ever work. I'm saying we need to stop acting like slaves and slave masters. No job should take a person 60 hours a week, and any boss who expects that is impeding the progress of our civilization. People in Europe don't work 60 hours a week. They don't even work 40 hours a week. They work shorter days, and fewer of them - up to 8 weeks fewer per year. They are driven by more than the "almighty dollar" with which America judges everything. Sick people in those countries get health care. Ours often don't. Parents get help with childcare in those countries - ours pay huge out of pocket prices for lesser care. They're kicking our asses in terms of education, scientific discovery, social justice. America has gone from being the leader in reducing work time to being the biggest slave driver in the game. We don't have to live this way.
The Puritan work ethic has ruined life in America. There's a joke in the Native American community that says before the white people arrived, men got to hunt and fish all day, women did all the work, and the white man thought he could improve a system like that. True, we don't live in wigwams or lodges anymore, but at what cost? I like indoor plumbing as much as anyone, but I happen to think we can have indoor plumbing and a quality of life that involves time spent doing what we want, spending time with friends and family, not worrying about what the clock says.
I can't tell you the amount of time wasted in just trying to enforce arbitrary work times. When I was a union steward, half my time was wasted by people upset because a worker came in a few minutes late during the week. Big shittin' deal. There was more money wasted holding those meetings than the workers ever missed out on. People took all kinds of unscheduled breaks throughout the day anyway, and half the people who came in at the early end of flextime spent their first two hours talking, eating breakfast and reading the paper rather than working. It was the classic case of being "penny wise and pound foolish" - one of those meetings cost more than those workers missed 20 or 30 times over, and they had them repeatedly. What did it accomplish? It made a few people miserable, and that's it. It didn't improve productivity, it certainly didn't improve anyone's attitude or morale, and it never made a difference in behavior because the behavior usually had a basis in some unchangeable circumstance that should have been taken into account in the first place.
Yes, someone needs to make the trains run on time - that's why the Goddess allows Republicans to persist - ha ha! No one should be working for a clock, though, and no one should be working themselves to death - the Japanese
actually have a word for working yourself to death! "Karoshi"
No Karoshi, no more! No resenting your neighbor for being sick or poor or young or old. No being a slave to a clock or exploiting others to make a little green. We're all in this life together so let's care about each other. I want to know that every baby in my community has enough to eat - I don't understand the people who don't. It's just not human to be so unconcerned with the welfare of others. I don't begrudge people their food stamps or HUD benefits or LIHEAP grants or any of the very few benefits that still exist for those who are unemployed, under-employed or unemployable.
Our culture tends to polarize itself, and the particular polarity of capitalism is ambition vs. compassion. We approve of people who cheat and steal. We must, or they 'd go to jail when they steal a company's retirement funds. Instead, we give them huge bonuses and let them go on to another company they can rip-off. We let them get away with this because we all think we're going to be one of the rich people one of these days, but as Tyler Durden points out above, we won't. People don't get to move into the upper classes, but they upper classes benefit from maintaining the illusion that it's possible. It isn't, and it's time to stop letting the Vampire Elite bleed us dry.
Greed is NOT good. It's not OK to resent people for living because you can work and they can't. If, some day, heaven forbid, you become unable to work, don't you want to know that you will be OK? That your culture won't let you end up under a bridge or sleeping on a grate? I want to know that. I live in a wealthy and wasteful culture where people who fought for this country are trying to survive in exactly those conditions. So are families with children, old men and women who should be in a safe nursing home or mental facility instead of on the street or in a shelter. If this doesn't bother you, there's something wrong with you. You're too focused on yourself to care about other people the way you should, and too damaged by the patriarchy to have normal human responses to the suffering of others.
There are a lot of damaged people walking around in this culture, and we made the mistake of letting a lot of them get into positions of power. This has to change, and only we can change it.
You always work as a group, not somebody singled out. There is no such thing as that with the Apache. We say, "I walk with you," not " I walk before you" or "I walk behind you"....You are not a leader, you are a part. -Philip Cassadore, Apache
It's time to heal America. She has been wounded by slavery, by theft, by genocide and cruelty. The wounds are fresh, the scars not yet formed. I want to see us wake up and realize that this is the moment when we can undo the damage of the past, and find our way to a future that includes us all. Feminists in particular should learn from the Native Nations as the Suffragists did. There are still extant matriarchies within our shores that function and thrive in spite of the generations of oppression and destruction. Some ideas are too good to die. Some ideas lie dormant, wait for another day, and come back stronger than ever.
I'm torn about this election. My Sisters say Hillary is the obvious choice, but I don't trust her. Barack says all the right words, but can a man right the wrongs of the patriarchal system? I liked his "More Perfect Union" speech, and I like the energy of the people around him. I wish I could trust that wave of energy and just surf. There's so much at stake now. Maybe it will take a transformational, cross-cultural person like Obama to create a new American face to show the world. I liked the fact that Richardson endorsed him today. I think Richardson, who is a Native American, is a good man. I think he knows an honest man when he meets one and I don't think he'd have made a choice if there were no clearly better candidate. He was 100% right about the fact that the Democrats need to stop fighting amongst themselves. There have been enormous amounts of money wasted on this election already - I don't see any benefit in continuing the fight for the nomination.
The web around the world makes a whole new way of living possible. We can look at the past, the present, where we've been and where we want to go with new eyes, from a new perspective. We can take the best of the best and create a better world. We can look objectively at our resources and find fair and efficient ways to use them. Do enough of us have the will to do that? Can we come together in a spirit of cooperation? Are there enough voices of compassion and generosity to drown out the old voices of division? Can America catch up with the rest of the world? Or are we going to let the braying of the media - the Chris Matthews and the Joe Scarboroughs - piss away this opportunity for us. Are we going to keep thinking of ourselves as individual islands of need with no connection to anyone or anything but our immediate surroundings?
Simple common sense - the ability to look at what you have, decide what must be done, then take action to see it through - is all it would take. That would mean ignoring lobbyists and special interests. It might inconvenience some people but there would be other compensation that would result. This can be a win-win situation for the world if we insist that it be so. So let's do. Let's make it happen.
