Blue Skies and Family Time Offer Up a New Vision
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Blue Skies and Family Time Offer Up a New Vision
Take Back Your Time Has Come to Silicon Valley
As an eco-humanist non-profit focused on the needs of planet and people, Human Agenda has an explicit vision and values that are ironically being showcased, in part, due to the Coronavirus catastrophe. Blue skies? Family time? Less traffic? Less crime? More free time?
For the first 10 years of its existence Human Agenda celebrated Take Back Your Time Day, an October 24 reminder every year that work-life balance based on reduced work hours provides the infrastructure for a more full and healthy life. The anthology Take Back Your Time is full of analysis showing that people who work less have more time for family, for self-care, for recycling, for democratic decision-making, for learning, and even for their dog! Well, guess what? Take Back Your Time has come to Silicon Valley!
With the Coronavirus shutdown and 51% less traffic, the sky and clouds look pristine. With the shelter in place order, families are re-connecting after the brutal rat race of driving and working long hours. Parents are re-discovering the joy of their children, and vice-versa. People have more time to read, hike, play games, cook, recycle, enjoy their pets, reflect, and even clean! Driving has become a relative joy as compared to just two weeks ago. There is a significant reduction in crime, reports the San Jose PD, and about a fifth of non-violent low-level criminals have been released, giving them the opportunity to live a fuller more meaningful life.
The vision of Human Agenda is all about that fuller life, a life denied to all of us under our current economic, financial, and political systems. Think about it: the vision of Human Agenda is to have a social system whereby everyone has the time, organization, and resources for:
Care work. We need time for self-care like proper eating and exercise and for family care including taking care of children, parents, and the household, equally shared by women and men.
Labor with reduced work hours with a living wage. Able-bodied human beings have a responsibility to reproduce our society by producing things of value but they need to be remunerated with family-sustaining income with reduced work hours.
Education for life. We are all learning machines until we die, but we need accurate information to learn.
Autonomy. The basis of authentic insertion into family, workplace, community, the world, and all the institutions that envelope us must be participatory democratic decision making. Without it, not only the individual but also the institution loses autonomy.
Realization. The pinnacle of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is free time for self-realization, where we do the things that define us individually as full human beings: art, sports, socializing, pleasure reading, games, hobbies, activities in 1-4 that give us joy, etc.
The Coronavirus pandemic offers us an opportunity to engage in some of these five CLEAR activities and reflect on how alienated our lives have become under our current economic system. With long work hours, we no longer have adequate time for (1) self and family care, (3) life-long learning, (4) participatory democratic decision-making, or (5) self-actualization, even though it is participation in all five areas that make us fully human.
Inmates, undocumented immigrants, the homeless, low-income people working two jobs, and those working long hours in Silicon Valley to produce the latest technological breakthrough are all prisoners of the grotesque alienation that we might now be able to identify.
If we value family and friends, we should demand reduced working hours, the fulcrum for addressing overwork and meeting our needs as human beings.
If we value clean air and the planet, the downtown San Jose overdevelopment nightmare should not proceed.
If we value institutions that can lead us to a CLEAR vision, we need to create family, local and workplace institutions that we call DECKS in Human Agenda: they need to be democratic, equitable, cooperative, kind, and sustainable.
We have a long way to go to build such DECKS institutions like democratic worker cooperatives, co-housing, and land trusts; public banks, healthcare, and education; and publicly financed elections.
A CLEAR vision with DECKS values could set us free.
Richard Hobbs
Executive Director of Human Agenda