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Tomorrow is yet another legal holiday. Martin Luther King Day comes only two weeks after the legal version of New Year's Day, three weeks after the legal version of Christmas which came less than five weeks after Thanksgiving, and five weeks before the legal version of a holiday that might be Washington's Birthday, Presidents' Day or Great Americans' Day, depending upon whom you ask.
I have nothing against honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. His eloquence, prayer and persistence changed the course of our society, and generally in a better way.
But if I want to honor King and the contributions of
African-Americans in general, then I ought to care enough
to do it on my own time, just as I occasinally set aside an
afternoon or evening for enjoying The Autobiography of
Malcolm X,
Collected Poems of Langford Hughes,
or Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings.
The problem with the King Holiday is the problem with other holidays.
Like most of my self-employed friends, I've gone to considerable work to arrange my life so that I pretty much enjoy what I do every day.
If we want to do something different, like ski, fish, hike, travel or contemplate the complete betrayal of the principles of the Declaration of Independence by the society that now claims Jefferson's words, we just do it
We don't need to ask Congress or the Colorado General Assembly for permission to take a day off. We don't insist that every American drop whatever she's doing to join us in a break from routine. We don't demand that the banks, post offices and courthouses be closed in order to thwart those who might want to do something productive on those days.
But our world is not run by those who like their daily work. The Haters run things. They despise their daily work, and every chance they get, they pass laws so that they can escape, however temporarily, their mundane oppressions.
If the Haters couldn't keep adding holidays to the calendar, their anger would build, and eventually they would take steps to solve their problems. They'd strike out on their own, or they'd demand that their workplaces become decent, enjoyable environments.
So a King Day doesn't improve the lot of black Americans, any more than a Labor Day improves the workplace. Eliminating the holidays, so that people would act on their grievances instead of merely pining for the next break, might cause some improvement.
Another problem with modern holidays is that many of them occur Monday, by law.
Now, if there's something about observing George Washington's Birthday that makes us better Americans, then why don't we do so on the actual date of Jan. 22, instead of the Third Monday in February?
It seems that mid-week holidays are hard on the economy. Wednesday chops the week in two. Tuesday or Thursday, and all the people with any power arrange a four-day weekend, which means that no decisions get made.
But why Monday instead of Friday? My hatred of holidays started when I owned a weekly newspaper which had to come out every Thursday. It was work enough to get the courthouse news when the place was open on a Monday. It became nigh impossible on those weeks with a Monday holiday. Move the holiday to Friday, and I might have even enjoyed the holiday.
In the workplace in general, there's a psychological
edge if you come in on Monday and think If we can get
five days' work done in four, we can take Friday off,
as opposed to coming in on Tuesday and discovering a pile
of extra work with no immediate time-off reward in
prospect.
So I suspect the Monday holiday, as opposed to the Friday holiday, was an invention of one of our commercial competitors, probably Japan, to reduce American productivity.
Even these objections to holidays might be ignored if holidays actually accomplished their ostensible purpose.
The root of holiday
is obvious: holy day.
That is, a day set aside for the sacred. The first holidays
were community feasts or fasts when normal operations were
suspended so that people might devote themselves to higher
and nobler thoughts.
But of the millions who will enjoy a day off with pay
tomorrow, how many will contemplate how evaluation by
content of character
has turned into color of
skin
when we were supposed to be evolving toward a
color-blind society?
Next month, how many Americans meditate upon George Washington's tribulations in the snows of Valley Forge, leading a band of ill-equipped revolutionaries against the superpower of the day? And how many more will frolic in the snows of Aspen or Vail? It's the biggest weekend of the season in an industry based on hedonism.
The same holds for most of our other holidays. They're commercial events. Who thinks about soldiers dying on battlefields when it's the First Weekend of the Summer Season? Or about holding certain rights to be inalienable when it's the Middle of the Summer Season? Or about the Ludlow Massacre when it's the Last Weekend of the Summer Season and the mountains beckon?
So if our holidays are supposed to bind us together as a nation by giving us a common culture, a set of events and heroes whom we all honor, they're a miserable failure.
Most Americans are not out decorating veterans' graves in May, or checking out the conditions at VA hospitals in November, or pondering the Spanish conquest of the Americas in October.
Instead, they're thinking of interesting things they might do on a day off, and never mind the reason they're getting the day off. It's time to eliminate general holidays.
If you've got something to celebrate, you can make your own arrangements. If you're too lazy to do that, then it doesn't mean much to you.
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