I'm a hard worker and love my work. I have felt pulled toward work. And it's a pull I have ferociously had to counter to make room for my family.
Arlie Russell HochschildRead
And we're in the middle of a 'perfect storm.' These days, government social services are being bad-mouthed and defunded. The non-profit world is looking more and more like the for-profit world. The growing gap between rich and poor makes most of us very anxious about where we stand.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the challenges faced by society due to diminishing social services and increasing inequality.
Arlie Russell Hochschild addresses the current socio-economic climate, describing it as a 'perfect storm' where governmental support systems are under attack, non-profits are increasingly operating like businesses, and the widening wealth gap intensifies societal anxiety. This reflects a critical moment in which many people feel uncertain about their positions in a rapidly changing world that seems to prioritize profit over welfare.
In practice
Discussing socio-economic policies at a community forum.
I'm a hard worker and love my work. I have felt pulled toward work. And it's a pull I have ferociously had to counter to make room for my family.
The focus of our public discourse has been on how American companies are competing with Japanese, German, and other foreign companies. What this allows us to ignore is how each of those American companies is really in competition with the families of the workers. That's the real competition.
What emotions would we experience if we weren't working ourselves to death? What wishes drive us? What fantasies hitch themselves to our continual busyness? Only when we step away from our frenzy can we know.
No work-family balance will ever fully take hold if the social conditions that might make it possible - men who are willing to share parenting and housework, communities that value work in the home as highly as work on the job, and policymakers and elected officials who are prepared to demand family-friendly reforms - remain out of reach.
In response to our fast-food culture, a 'slow food' movement appeared. Out of hurried parenthood, a move toward slow parenting could be growing. With vital government supports for state-of-the-art public child care and paid parental leave, maybe we would be ready to try slow love and marriage.
Could it be, I wonder, that there is such a thing as a wantologist, someone we can hire to figure out what we want? Have I arrived at some final telling moment in my research on outsourcing intimate parts of our lives, or at the absurdist edge of the market frontier?
There's been the same kind of demonizing of the word 'feminism' as words like 'liberal,' 'affirmative action,' and so on.
So easy to fall into a rut, isn't it? Why should ruts be so comfortable and so unpopular?
We know what the birth of a revolution looks like: A student stands before a tank. A fruit seller sets himself on fire. A line of monks link arms in a human chain. Crowds surge, soldiers fire, gusts of rage pull down the monuments of tyrants, and maybe, sometimes, justice rises from the flames.
Life is movement. Movement is change. Every time a sub molecular particle swings through time and space, something is changing. Change, therefore, is inevitable. It is the nature of life itself. The trick in life is not to try to avoid change, but to create change. Then it is the kind of change you choose.
We can now have action movies with two stars where one might be African American and one might be Asian American. One of them doesn't have to be white, and the other one doesn't have to be the ethnic sidekick. We're way over that. And I think it's happening in society, too.
Now it is the least developed world who are not responsible for this climate change phenomenon that bore the brunt of climate change consequences so it is morally and politically correct that the developed world who made this climate change be responsible by providing financial support and technological support to these people.
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