Re-thinking Things

One of my favorite Paleo bloggers, Melissa McEwen, wrote a post almost a month ago that is still getting comments over at her place, Hunt, Gather, Love.

That post is titled: We are going to have to rethink things, won't we?

When I was a freelancer and I worked from home it wasn't so obvious to me why Americans are so unhealthy. Now it's totally obvious. Cooking and the housekeeping the accompanies it takes time and when every adult member of the household works 40 hours a week, that becomes very difficult. It's even worse because most people don't particularly enjoy their jobs and would like to come home and do something they enjoy. Wouldn't it be great if everyone loved cooking? But it just doesn't work that way.

No, it certainly does not. Used to be we lived in a world of clearly defined gender roles, men worked, women cooked. That state of affairs simply would not do!

I don't have children and I struggle to cook every day. What's the point of all the productivity gains we've made if we all have to work the same amount of hours? When I first started working I once tallied up the percentage of my life that would be spent at work or commuting at the current rate and it was too depressing a calculation to repeat.

One of the first realizations you have to come to if you decide to eat better to lose weight and achieve better health, is that you are going to have to re-orient your daily routine to fit in cooking as an integral part of your lifestyle. There is no two ways around it.

Housekeeping is very difficult when there is no one keeping house, when it's an afterthought in an exhausting day. Me? I'd love to work fewer hours and while I'd have to cut back on some things, I feel my quality of life would be higher. But there aren't many jobs available for 15 or even 30 hours a week and almost none provide any kind of benefits.

One of the most devious schemes ever implemented by our corporatist state was the idea that an employer should become the primary provider of "benefits." These benefits become a form of self-imposed serfdom. Kinda hard to tell your company that they want you to do something for which you object to...because you can't afford to get fired, or to quit, or you'll lose your health coverage. So you suck it up and deal with it. Back to work, you human resource!

Perhaps we should just give up and acknowledge that the price of the American workforce is that few people have time to cook healthy meals. Then we need to focus on having better restaurants. Right now if you are eating out a lot, you are probably getting tons of vegetable oil. Even Thomas Keller, Michelin-Starred Chef, uses canola oil at his enourmously expensive restaurants.

I'm certainly not aiming to bust on Melissa, as I respect her blogging and her obvious intellect greatly, but she misses the forest for the trees here...

This is the price of socially engineering the gender "equality" of the American workforce. The cooking of the stay at home Mom used to be the primary source of nutrition for her entire family. Now she's a tax paying human resource along with her babies' Daddy working to pay off the debt for affording the lifestyle appearances of the mythical middle class, American dream. The fast food restaurants, public school cafeterias and convenience food manufacturers are now feeding the masses.

In short, the functions of the stay at home mother have all been outsourced to the giant corporations.

The idea that career is a form of fulfillment is a fantasy for all but a lucky few.

Oh yes, and that fantasy was the precise dream sold to the masses to get the American female out of the kitchen and out into the workforce. That way they can maintain the lifestyle of buying things we don't need, with money we don't have.

In reality, this idea is just a way to make people feel better about having to give their lives away for trivial things. By the time they retire, their health is so battered that they spend the remaining years shoveling pills into their mouths in a nursing home.

To paraphrase the late George Carlin: It's called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.

It's time to put work back in its place- it's a way to make a living for most of us and a lot of us would be willing to trade off some income for more time. More time to acquire healthy food, cook it, keep house, spend time with our own children, enjoy life...

To think...this was the basic reality for most women in those horrible, oppressive days of the 1950's that have been so reviled and mocked by today's modern-minded progressive.

While we may want to re-think things, you may come to the realization that it's all been thought out for us already.

Transcription of an excerpt from Aaron Russo’s last interview before his death in 2007:Reflections And Warnings: An Interview With Aaron Russo, Entire Film

Well one of the things he told me was that.. he was at the house one night and we started talking and he was laughing and he said,

“Aaron what do you think Women’s Liberation was all about?”

And I had pretty conventional thinking about it at that point and I said,

“I think it’s about women having the right to work to get equal pay with men just like they won the right to vote.”

He started to laugh and he said,

“Your an idiot.”

And I said,

“Why am I an idiot?”

And he said,

“Let me tell you what that was about. We the Rockefellers funded that.”

“We funded Women’s Lib and we’re the ones who got it all over the newspapers and television (through) the Rockefeller Foundation…”

And he says,

“You wanna know why?

There were two primary reasons.

And one reason was we couldn’t tax half the population before Women’s Lib and the second reason was now we get the kids in school at an early age.. we can indoctrinate kids on how to think and with it break up their family. The kids start looking at the state as the family.. As the schools as the officials as their family.. not the parents teaching them. And so those were the two primary reasons for Women’s Lib.”