ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, March 30, 1997 TAG: 9704010002
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARSHALL FISHWICK
THERE WAS a time when we seemed to have lots of time, but it has vanished. We are overwhelmed with tasks at home, at work, at school, even at play. Do what we will, we are always running out of time.
In the late 20th century, time has become a thief. It has stolen our leisure and may even be eroding our civilization. The time issue crosses class, race and gender lines, affecting family, friends and communities. Nobody has any time; our search for leisure and play has become a scavenger hunt.
Play has become work, leisure remains a mirage. Today's pleasure-seeker is like Dante in the meadows of Paradise - a guilt-ridden stranger in a Heaven of his own design. "What are you doing here?" Beatrice asks him. "Shouldn't you be back on the job?"
Harvard University Professor Juliet Schor and "Time Wars" author Jeremy Rifkin have uncovered these startling facts:
One third of the people who didn't vote in the 1996 elections "didn't have time."
One of two Americans doesn't get enough sleep.
The average workweek for Americans has increased 170 hours per year - that's an added full month.
Twenty-three percent of the population gets zero days' vacation.
Parents spend 40 percent less time with children than a generation ago.
Postal workers must process one letter every second to meet work standards.
Many labor strikes (such as the recent one at General Motors) are not about higher wages but excessive overtime.
The epidemic of stress (doctors use the term "time urgency") costs the American economy $100 billion a year.
American productivity has doubled since World War II, but the promise of leisure seems further away than ever.
Half the working mothers say they don't have time to prepare regular meals for their families.
There is a cruel irony here. For years, a whole series of "labor-saving devices" - automatic machines, robots, frozen foods and "instant" packaging - promised us unheard-of leisure and free time. What happened? Our homes and shops are cluttered with far more stuff; but as Ruth Schwartz Cowan demonstrates in "More Work for Mother," today's woman devotes as much time to housework as did her colonial sister over two centuries ago.
Homogenized housework has not given the leisure it promises. "The end result," Dr. Cowan writes, "is that housewives, even the most comfortable, are doing their housework themselves... Even those helpers upon whom the poverty-stricken house once depended have disappeared. Housework has become manual labor. The wife of the lawyer is just as apt to be down on her knees cleaning the kitchen floor as the wife of the garbage man."
Children, meanwhile, are overwhelmed by homework, make-work, extracurricular meetings, test scores, SATs and class ratings. In their classes, sports and college-admissions scramble, winner take all. Children's games and outings have become a rat race. At summer camp, children as young as 3 spend as much as eight hours a day learning to use computers. Some vacation!
But surely the parents strolling leisurely along their Information highway have ample leisure. Not so.
Downsizing means work-loading on those who manage to keep their jobs. True, machines are generating more paper, more memos, more instructions. But just to work through the day's e-mail, faxes, cellular phones and conference calls turns us into Sorcerer's Apprentices. Flooded with information, we can't stop the deluge.
All this might change, you say, when the time-saving Internet covers the world. Endless information! Instant communication! Everything right here right now!
Don't count on it. The April 29, 1996, issue of Fortune magazine casts doubt on this electronic utopia. The headline of a key article reads:
"It's the End of the Net as We Know It. An Industry Analyst Explains What the Internet Bottleneck Means to Business."
"The vision of the Internet as a shared network," author William Gurley concludes, "is nothing more than an academia-based egalitarian dream that is inherently unsustainable."
So what is leisure? Why has it backfired?
Leisure - time free from tension and work; being at ease - is not just a place away, but a state of mind. To be enjoyable, it presupposes either great fatigue or some absorbing interest outside the workplace. Most of our work is no longer physically demanding but is mentally draining; we end up nervously strained. We need to relax, not rest.
So what do many of us do away from work? Put our minds in neutral and let talk radio, TV sitcoms and tabloid journalism take over. We don't cogitate, we vegetate. The cotton-candy nourishment of entertainment, and not religion (as Marx predicted), has become the opiate of the masses.
Why not get away from the grind - enjoy a vacation? But even play has become work. Pan American Airlines used to advertise, "Getting there is half the fun." PanAm has disappeared. So has the fun.
Norman Lobenz traces the vacation pilgrim in his book, "Is Anybody Happy? A Study of the American in Search of Pleasure." Hub airports remind us of bus stations during World War II. Going by plane is not "traveling" at all. It is merely being "sent" to a place - very little different from becoming a piece of luggage.
Landscape? What can you see from 30,000 feet? Hungry? Grab a few peanuts and a drink in a plastic cup to keep you alive upon arrival. Then rush to the motel, symbol of hurry-up-and-relax America. No place is less anyplace than a motel.
Or, rent a car and take your chances on the truck-dominated interstate - the climax in homogenizing the motorists' landscape. Try to hold out until you reach the next McDonald's. No wonder the hapless child, crammed into the station wagon's third seat, asks plaintively, "Are we having fun yet?"
Don't blame "the system," the boss, or the job. We are the system - we accept and abide by its dictates. We repeat and endorse platitudes and truisms. If and when we really want to, we can change them.
Many are already doing so, in this time of massive transition and rethinking. Instead of "bigger is best," we might say "small is beautiful." Instead of considering the trends of the stock market, we might consider the lilies of the field. We could change "Why settle for less?" to "Less is more." Instead of holding up a single figure after winning the game - "I'm No. 1!' - we might imitate Churchill and hold up two, to make a "V" for victory - over our own all absorbing self-interest.
Then, perhaps, we can have new communities and real vacations That might not take us across oceans but into our our own back yard. We could end up like our flowers - blooming where we are planted.
MARSHALL FISHWICK is a professor of humanities and communications at Virginia Tech.
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