The Lunch Break Blog

Boredom is Not Freedom 04/02/2009

With the Easter Holidays coming up, I hear alot around the lunch table about how much people are looking forward to a few days off. This vacation time is natural and necessary. It is a time to worship, visit with family and friends, and catch up on spring cleaning or gardening. I believe in all of these things as components to a happy life. What troubles me is when people look forward to doing nothing. It is also a natural inclination for humans to delay responsibilities in the hopes of temporary respite from work. However, if this notion is allowed to persist, one can fall into the trap of believing that boredom equals freedom.

Most responsible adults I know see through the illusion that freedom is idleness and know that an empty agenda is an empty happiness. This wisdom is why most people plan family or social gatherings, projects or trips for themselves on their days off. But make no mistake about it, the culture of American consumerism would have it so no one has anything to do all the time. Why? So we can buy their ipods, cell phones, cigarettes, fast food, PSPs, or whatever else. Beware of the person with too many time-consuming gadgets, this person, in reality, avoids real responsibility and maturity.

Take the President’s recent gifts to our British cousins across the pond as an example. First, he gave Gordon Brown a collection of 25 DVDs and most recently, he’s given the Queen an ipod. Are these the best gifts America can offer foreign diginitaries? Now I know meetings with the Queen and press conferences with heads of state are largely symbolic and do not have much practical impact on diplomacy. But do not ignore the importance of symbolism on the American psyche, especially in times of stress. Ipods and DVDs suggest that there’s nothing better to do than to sit around in front of a TV or to isolate yourself from everyone around you with your ears plugged up.  Are these the greatest products of the American ideal of liberty that we would present to the world?

Instead of offering leisure items to our best allies, our President needs to convey the finer fruits of the American experience. We should show the Brits and the rest of the world that the American brand of freedom breeds hard work, discipline and ingenuity. Instead of wasteful DVDs give them steel shovels and muddy tractors; instead of shiny ipods, present inky pens and well-worn guitars. Maybe these things are only symbols, representative of an all-but-forgotten America, but they show the true worth and value of the liberty to work, create and pursue happiness.

Symbols, whether true or false, can give still the correct message. Maybe this message, once verbalized and symbolized, will be once again actualized and lead us to brighter days. Maybe people have to be forcibly stripped of their savings and jobs and forced into the prison of their own boredom to see that free time does not equal freedom. Maybe then will we recognize our consumerism-driven thirst for leisure as the “deliverance which does not deliver” and rise up from the economic trench we have blindly dug under the pretense of vacation and holiday. The next time chronic boredom strikes, remember you have been warned. Turn not to your personal screens, gadgets and doo-hickies; rather turn to your school books, your vegetable garden, or your pile of paperwork. Come to the realization that, as once stated by  the Big Lebowski, “The bums lost . . . do what your parents did, and get a job sir!”