"Forget it."
"I'll paint the crane green!" I was getting desperate. "I'll paint the steel green and write pro-Earth messages on it. Why does it have to be balloons?"
Click.
Earth Day's anti-business bias is not surprising, considering its origins. John McConnell, a self-proclaimed founder of Earth Day (as with other successful institutions, there are rival paternity claims), wrote in his seminal statement of purpose, "Earth Magna Charta": "The long-term goal must be to restructure social institutions so that there is equitable return for services, efficient balance of supply and demand, and fair benefits from our mutual claims to Earth's natural bounty.... One possible way to equitable benefits is for those who own land, oil, gold or other minerals to pay a 2 percent royalty each year on their income from these resources to a fund that will then provide the homeless their inheritance or stake in their planet. All will then join in responsible care of Earth."
For McConnell, who at the age of 85 is still actively promoting Earth Day, the goal is nothing less than the complete reorganization of the world economy: "The digital economy will make it possible to eventually replace money and credit as we know it with new, fair methods of trade and exchange." Weirdly coinciding this year with anti-enterprise Earth Day is the seventh annual Take Your Daughter to Work Day, a promotion by Ms. magazine, which as a sideline this year helpfully offers $50 "grownup kits" and other paraphernalia to help get you started. This year's inspiring slogan: "The Future Is Me."
Unlike Earth Day, which is merely a crime against working people, this event is a crime against children. It teaches them that it's not what you make of yourself, how hard you work, what you know, or even whom you know that determines your success and professional satisfaction. It's the biological equipment you are born with.
Last year, I entertained a passel of girls whose parents brought them in to introduce them to the mysteries of the workplace. "Where are your brothers today?" I asked them.
"In school!" they chortled. "Only girls get to go to work with their moms and dads on Take Your Daughter to Work Day!"
"Boys have all the advantages," explained a poised 8-year-old, my factory landlord's daughter, calmly collecting my rent check and neatly writing out a receipt. "That's why I get to do this."
This real estate manager's daughter was luckier than many. It turns out that only certain kinds of labor qualify as "work." In 1996 one Michigan mother-daughter team found themselves in trouble when they spent the day doing spring cleaning. School officials balked at giving the teenager credit. "My work at home is my job," said the mother. "I'm taking care of my family. I wanted to show her what work was like at home."
Eventually the school relented. But it's clear that the ritual of spending a day in a parent's or other relative's workplace--a fine idea for both boys and girls--is designed to advance a political rather than an educational agenda.
Secretaries Day®, a promotion by the flower industry, offers (presumably male) bosses the opportunity to proclaim their endorsement of the new, employee-sensitive, "caring and sharing" workplace by bestowing traditional symbols of seduction --flowers, candy, and luncheon or dinner à deux--on female employees.
Something seems amiss here, and not only because the recommended romantic offerings also connote apology. It's as though the boss is acknowledging, one day a year, the underappreciated women who endure his temper tantrums, hangovers, and general boorishness while uncomplainingly performing his work so he can take the credit.
More to the point, changing workplace roles have made it unclear just who is entitled to the posies. Managers tap out their own inter-office memos, administrative assistants mutate into account executives, and information systems personnel and programmers are as likely to be male as female. In my office the men have taken to lampooning this holiday by sending flowers to one another (but not to the women) to avoid giving offense.
A day honoring office workers is a commendable notion. The pros who operate the switchboards, fax machines, and computers, and generally keep the wheels of commerce oiled, deserve recognition. But why not say it with a magazine subscription or a gift certificate from a bookstore, and leave the sexist overtures out of it?
The dates of all three manufactured celebrations are fungible, with different promoters declaring various days to be the "official" one. We should be grateful for the lack of central planning, but the unfortunate result is that all these holidays are exhibiting creepage. Secretaries Day®, formerly the third Wednesday in April, has mutated into Secretaries Week® (April 18-23), and Earth Day, due to some factional conflict between proponents of March 22 and champions of April 22, has been transformed into Earth Month.
Earth Month 2000, according to Earthday.org, McConnell's outfit, will boast 2 billion participants, or nearly a third of the world's population. With any luck, his economic redistribution plan will be well under way by then, enabling all the participants to purchase their allotment of Earth-friendly souvenirs.
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