A woman who calls herself Annie Leonard is the author of “The Story of Stuff.” Annie thinks we pay way too much attention to stuff.
“We’re in the midst of a triple crisis: economy, environment and climate. I’d add a fourth: a crisis of well-being. Despite buying, consuming and discarding an ever-increasing amount of stuff, quality of life is eroding. We’re overstressed at work. We long for more time with our families and friends. Participation in community and civic affairs is declining,” she wrote as her part in a five-person discussion in Wednesday’s New York Times.
Among her prescriptions for relief were:
“Reducing work hours and spreading them more evenly would … help. Today many of us are overworked while millions of us can’t find jobs. Americans work longer hours than citizens of any other industrialized nation — on average nearly nine weeks a year more than in Western Europe. And with fewer vacations: many Americans get less than two weeks a year while the average European gets five or six weeks.
“The result? We’re exhausted, we’re stressed — and for relief we go shopping. Getting off the work-spend treadmill would free up time for the things that nurture our well-being. The economy would be stronger and we’d have more time to spend with our kids, to get to know our neighbors, to volunteer and take an interest in community affairs — to be citizens, not just consumers.”
ANNIE, GET REAL. Americans don’t want a country where government can make these kinds of lifestyle decisions, as governments have done in Western Europe. So set your sights on a different target. Americans do want full employment. We also want a society in which the wealth is spread much more fairly than it is in America today.
Full employment can be achieved by putting the unemployed to work building roads and bridges, homes for the homeless, schools, fitness centers, parks and meeting other unmet needs — programs that could be phased out as the private economy recovered. A fairer distribution of the nation’s wealth can be achieved rapidly through rational tax reform.
Government can do these things today as it has in the past. Getting there from here would be close enough to Utopia for most of us.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
