Holidays

It is now about two weeks since the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, and I have been meaning to write a short post here about it. There are too many holidays. What is worse, the people who tend to get work off on trivial holidays––and there are three I have in mind, in particular––are the ones who don't need the favor. People who really have to work for a living--and by that I mean people who do physical labor--very often do not get these days off, which only accentuates gratuitously the unfairness built into our contemporary political economy.

The Martin Luther King holiday, along with Columbus Day and Veterans Day, should be abolished. This does not mean that we should not as a nation honor and respect Dr. King and his work. But why that respect should require a day off of work is beyond me. Dr. King was a very hard-working man, a relentless warrior on behalf of human dignity, and the best way to show him respect is to work on his birthday, especially to work for the things he believed in most deeply.

Columbus Day is completely ridiculous. It has come down to Italian–American day. I know lots of Italian Americans, and a group of people more easily persuaded to relax and celebrate I cannot think of, but that is no reason to have a national off-work holiday. If we have a holiday for Italian-Americans, then why isn't St. Patrick's Day an equivalent day off based on the idea of a holiday for Irish-Americans? And maybe we need a day off to honor Polish-Americans and German-Americans and Hispanic-Americans and obviously I could go on--the point being that all of this is quite silly, especially at a time when the heroism of Christopher Columbus is by no means a consensus view.

Veterans Day is an even stupider holiday because it is obsolete. It commemorates the end of World War I, which was of course in 1918. We have Memorial Day now, which subsumes Veterans Day, and it is telling, by way of logic anyway, that we don't have a special holiday marking the end of World War II, which is more recent and from which we still have many living veterans. The November 11 holiday, out it goes!

If we take away these three silly holidays it will help the economy. This stuff adds up. At the same time, we need to add one holiday once every other year, and that is Election Day.

People should not have to go to work on election day, whether it is for electing a president or for the midterm elections. The fact that election day is not a holiday from work prejudices outcomes. It is much harder for laborers to take off work to vote than it is for better-situated others. If we made election day a day free from work we would get substantially larger turnouts, and that would be good for American democracy.

There is one more change I would like to make to the calendar that we use: No public school student at any level in our education system should be made to start school before Labor Day. It's just downright un-American.

This outrage started back in the 1970s as a means to save energy. If you move the school year start date up and move the school year end date back, and give students more time off in the dead of winter, the idea went, you can save on the bill to heat the schools. Thanks to global warming––I'm kidding here, of course––that is no longer a serious concern. It no longer gets very cold in late December and January, as this year's winter in the mid-Atlantic states has proven beyond any shadow of a doubt.

The real reason not to persist with this bad idea is that in late August American kids ought to be helping out on the farm or going hiking or splashing around in water or playing sports or taking long-distance bicycle trips or going camping––all positive and in their own way educational activities. They should not be cooped up in a school building during warm weather and asked to keep quiet and still in order to learn whatever it is that they could just as easily learn a few weeks later.

This would also be good for the economy. A lot of families avoid taking vacations toward the end of August because they have to be around to put their kids in school. If we extend what amounts to the American vacation season, which really means just putting it back where was a few decades ago, it will help an important aspect of our economy.

I think these suggestions are as obvious as they are sensible. And that is why, the American political class being the way it is, none of this will ever happen. (Slow burn.......)