Let's hear it for the August holidays!

Via Alternet, a truly brilliant proposal:

Once, led by organized labor and enlightened church leaders, American progressives were champions for more time. When thousands of women textile workers walked out of the mills of Lawrence, Massachusetts during the great strike of 1912, they carried signs that read: We Want Bread, and Roses Too.

Bread and roses, symbols of the two important sides of life: bread, the money to live, and roses, the time to enjoy life – higher wages and shorter hours. But somewhere along the line, we got "bread and butter" unionism focused solely on wages. The roses were left to wilt.

Yet Americans need roses now more than ever. They are telling us they're tired and want time to live. We should speak boldly, and in clear moral language, for their right to time, for their right to roses. We could live better as Americans by working less, and finding more time for the things that matter most – family, friends, community, and health – instead of being obsessed with material products and economic growth.

It's all a matter of values.

It's long been my contention that the best thing the government could do for families, for everyone, actually, is mandate more vacation time. It's something that companies simply will not do unless forced, that nearly all other industrialized nations have MUCH more of, and that the President himself takes plenty of. If the leader of the free world gets to loaf around in August, how come the rest of us can't?

A populace that is too busy to cook and eat properly, to spend time with one's family around a dinner table -- indeed, too busy to think -- is a populace that watches lots of TV, eats Hot Pockets, and thinks Saddam Hussein had something to do with September 11th.

[utterly unrelated, but brought to mind by Bread and Roses: Why in god's name did Whole Foods Market deprecate the Bread and Circus brand? It was a far, far better name for a grocery store than Whole Foods Market is. And does anyone know someone who used to shop at Bread and Circus and now actually calls the place they shop Whole Foods Market? B&C forever!]