Page 43 - Liberating Liberals V2

Liberating Liberals
mph rush-hour traffic by 8, and labor 9-to-5, five or more days a week. If we don’t we’re not going to get the food, housing, and health care necessary to exist in the first place.
The vast factories, giant skyscrapers and almost infinite infrastructure that support this arrangement are breathtakingly impressive and inundate us with railroading, imposed meanings. Whether or not they are truly meaningful to us has to be an afterthought to maintaining the energy needed to support the workaday world.
Unless we are able to liberate ourselves from this often onerous servitude, thinking about what could be becomes almost impossible. So much energy has to be used working the 40 or more hours. All meaning must be constructed around maintaining that schedule.
It’s true that some people can pull the shifts and still have enough free time energy to think outside their hardworking box. Others are left gasping like a fish out of water, forced to inhale large draughts of frenzied life during off hours to compensate for their alienated status at work. Of course many other people love their jobs and get vast, free-thinking sustainable meaning from them.
The 1960s was in part a revolt against this sometimes gratifying and sometimes oppressive treadmill. Many liberals have attained either some freedom from it, or at least an intellectual distance. Once the distance is attained, the first question is
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