Why can’t Americans take holidays?

How has a country founded on the promotion of the ‘pursuit of happiness’ become the No Vacation Nation?

History holds some of the answer. 
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The Puritans who first settled here had a Protestant work ethic that an idle mind is the Devil’s workshop.
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Those killjoy early Americans believed that taking a break from labor for reasons other than weekly observance of the Sabbath was sinful
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A month in Ibiza, honey?
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The conviction that hard work is the cornerstone of life has been shared by those who have espoused that work ethic, from Benjamin Franklin to Henry Ford, from Willy Loman to Ayn Rand, from Bill Gates to Michele Bachmann.
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All these Dreamers of Abundance have taken Shakespeare’s Henry IV’s counsel as far as they could
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If all the year were playing holidays,/To sport would be as tedious as to work. (Although I suspect they would all consider Elizabethan theater to be a frivolous waste of time).
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American Law reflects this cultural war on sloth. 
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Americans do not like the nanny state — AKA the Federal Government — telling them what to do, especially when it comes to running their businesses. 
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This is a main reason why the US is the only industrialized country in the world where central government does not mandate companies to give its worker bees any paid holidays at all.
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None at all.
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Labour unions have far less power to protect workers’ mental and physical health than in Europe. 
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Their influence has been eroding since the 1968 collapse of the New Deal coalition. In 1970. 
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Americans were still working ten percent fewer hours than the French, largely thanks to strong unions.  
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Union membership then began a steady decline, as did their public support. 
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The Reagan administration made it harder for new unions to be formed, and Republicans have continued that sacred mission ever since. 
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In March of this year, the new Wisconsin governor, Scott Walker, signed a law that took away collective bargaining rights from most public workers.
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The result is that the American worker is vulnerable to exploitation by all the Mr Gradgrinds and Mr Burnses out there. 
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When I moved to New York, I was “let go” from a job. 
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When I protested that I had received no warning, nor had my boss giving me any reason for firing me, I heard for the first time the term “employment at will” – referring to the right of any boss to terminate employment at whim. 
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My outrage was useless. In London, getting fired was rare and shameful; in New York, it’s as commonplace as a bagel, and best treated with a shrug. 
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Hoping that America will introduce “wrongful dismissal” to defend its workers is as much of a pipe-dream as it is for assault rifles to be banned.
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So you think you're irreplaceable...?
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Without union protection, national paranoia has set in. 
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Those in gainful employment have to watch their own back. 
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According to John Wright, senior vice president at Ipsos
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People are fearful for their jobs. 
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They need the money. 
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They don’t want to miss out on anything at work because they don’t want to fall behind or lose their job
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They work longer hours and proudly boast about how long they work.
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Note however that American productivity is not higher than elsewhere.
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With real US unemployment at a whopping 16%, jobs are highly prized. 
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If establishing a competitive advantage requires accepting a job that has absolutely no paid vacation – a deal that one in four Americans has accepted – so be it.
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But still — have you ever heard of a Brit accepting a job involving no holidays?
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I asked the vendor at my local bookseller for further insight into this strange work-life imbalance. 
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Americans are terrified of free time, he said grimly. 
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They’re scared of what they might do with their hands.
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Onanism aside, many Americans get the heebie-jeebies at just the thought of traveling abroad. 
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Starved of accurate international news. 
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Americans come up with elaborate reasons not to leave the homeland: 
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Pick a country, my Californian friend Micah told me, and there’s a serious situation going on. 
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I could get decapitated in Mexico, mugged in Casablanca, or blown up in Spain. 
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And look at the joke that England has become after the riots – why would anyone go there now?
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The terror is only growing. 
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According to John Schmidt, author of No Vacation Nation.
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Being in a recession intensifies the pressure on workers to buckle down and work as hard as they can
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So if the boss has to make a decision on letting 10 percent go, you’re not on that list.
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Like a plague, the economic downturn is spreading the anti-holiday virus across the world. 
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Attacking holidays as wasteful dovetails neatly with many politicians’ need to justify tough austerity measures.
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German Chancellor Angela Merkel recently scolded southern European countries for their laziness.
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We can’t have a common currency when some gets lots of holiday time and others very little she said.
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French President Nicolas Sarkozy, a fan of American jingoism, instructed his ministers in the spring not to leave the country for their holidays
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Noting that they were “entitled to rest, but not to a vacation, and ordering them to stay in daily touch with their office.
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Sebastian Doggart

America, the no-vacation nation

Sebastian Doggart investigates why Americans find it so hard to take a holiday – and how their brutal work ethic is corrupting their souls.
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Last week, I was sitting on a beach in Spain, gloriously secluded from the social and financial shitzkriegs blighting the real world. 
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The beige Catalonian sand was scattered with multi-generational Dutch and Spanish families, many of them on holiday for the whole of August. 
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As I watched them slumber and frolic, I realized I’d never seen anything like this in my adopted homeland of America. 
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Which makes me wonder
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Why don’t Americans go on holiday?
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Across the pond, it’s called ‘vacation’ – a far more tuneless word than ‘holiday’, which has both a sacred and a joyful ring. 
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Vacation’ feels hollow, as befits its Latin root ‘vacare’, meaning ‘to be empty’. 
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It’s easy for Madonna and the Dead Kennedys to sing about holidays, but vacation is such an mealy mouthful. 
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It could easily refer to a bowel movement.
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I just had a most satisfying vacation.
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Statistics tell the dark story of America’s vacation deprivation
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According to the World Tourism Association, the average Italian gets 42 paid days off a year. 
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The French get 37, the Brits 28, and the Japanese 25. 
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Uncle Sam metes out a measly 13 days off.
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A separate study, commissioned by Expedia concurs on that 13 day figure, confirming that Americans are the most hard done by, while claiming that the average employed Frenchman is the most pampered, with 38 paid days off:
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I’m with the French and Italians on this one. 
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A holiday makes us better workers, giving us physical and psychological space to come up with new ideas and perspectives.
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Even the scarce free time allocated to Americans comes with strings attached. 
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Many employers frown on workers traveling too far from home, in case some crisis should require them to be recalled. 
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This has led to the creation of another ugly American word — the ‘staycation’.
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Those same bosses have discouraged long holidays, meaning anything more than a week. 
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Most American vacations are now just extended weekends.
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Sorry, but a three-day break is just not enough. 
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An optimal holiday is three weeks long. 
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The first week purges the stress of travel and past work; the second week can be enjoyed living in the present; and the final week is to prepare gently for the future of returning home.
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Many Americans don’t even take the few days off given them. 
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According to a recent survey by Ipsos/Reuters, a whopping 43% of Americans don’t take all of the vacation time allotted to them. 
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That compares to only 11% of French citizens, and 23% of Brits, who forget or decline to take all their due days off.
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The pressure increases for those who do go out on a limb and leave the country. 
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According to another recent poll, by Adweek/Harris, almost 50% of American said they will (or did) work on holiday – monitoring emails and taking phone calls. 
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Men are more likely than women to work (54% vs. 37%)
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I wrote the first draft of this piece on my Android on the beach, so I can’t claim to be totally immune from the temptations to work on holiday. 
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But after I’d switched off the phone, I was still able to relax completely, enjoying an exquisite black squid-ink paella, as I stared at the Mediterranean, a glass of manzanilla sherry in my hand. 
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Only a third of American vacationers say they ever “detach fully” on vacation.
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An aversion to spending time together as a family is deeply ingrained in the American psyche. 
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It starts at birth. 
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Most of the world concurs that a bonding period between baby and parents is healthy. 
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In Sweden, for example, the law guarantees 16 months of paid leave to both mum and dad. 
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In the US, the federal government mandates precisely zero weeks of paid maternity or paternity leave.
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Many female executives boast about how soon they return to work after giving birth. 
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Indra Nooyi, the CEO of Pepsi, and Forbes  magazine's fifth most powerful woman in the wolrd describes her own heroic encounter with American childbirth.
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When I had my second child, I was in the middle of an important project at work. 
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The day after I had her, my boss came to see me in the hospital and said.
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Now that you’ve had the baby, can I send in my team to come work with you?’ 
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I had a C-section, and he said, ‘Your body had the baby, but your brain still works.’ 
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I said it was OK to send them in to my hospital room. 
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The baby was sleeping most of the time, and I was wide awake — it wasn’t physical work, it was mental work so I didn’t mind.”
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After they’re born, children of the Land of the Free are quickly discouraged from free time. 
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Once in school, American kids get far fewer holidays than in Europe. 
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Primary and secondary schools give no Easter or Christmas holidays to speak of, with the typical ‘winter break’ beginning on Christmas Eve and ending New Year’s Day. 
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There’s a short ‘Spring Break’, but no version of the British half-terms. 
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Summer vacations last around ten weeks, but, rather than using that period to concoct adventures and shared time, many parents fill that period by sending their kids away so they can – yes, that’s right – work. 
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The place to which they dispatch their offspring — ‘camp’ – sounds like a Soviet prison.
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At 18, after leaving school, and before going to university, a scholarship let me spend two years traveling in Africa, and then working as a journalist in Latin America. 
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It was a formative period for me, personally and professionally. 
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The tradition of the ‘gap year’ is strong in Britain. 
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In Scandinavian countries there are public funds to pay for school leavers to travel abroad. 
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In the US, that tradition is completely alien. 
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The closest there is to a gap year in America is the Peace Corps, where university students donate their sweat to build bridges in Peru; or the kibbutz for Jewish Americans, also structured around hard physical toil. 
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Exploration and adventure – let alone the fine European traditions of the Grand Tour, or the wandering of Baudelaire’s flâneur — are all viewed as reckless indulgences
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Once university’s over, most Americans accept the idea that there’ll be no more extended breaks until the distant promise of retirement – ‘golden years’ in Palm Beach spent on golf courses and under the plastic surgeon’s knife. 
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To realize that American Dream, they’ll have to work their butts off.
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So why and how has a country founded on the promotion of the ‘pursuit of happiness’ become the No Vacation Nation?
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Sebastian Doggart

Not trying to worry you but........

Our last line of defence against bacterial infections is fast becoming weakened by a growing number of deadly strains that are resistant to even the strongest antibiotics, according to new figures given by the Health Protection Agency (HPA)
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The disturbing statistics reveal an explosion in cases of super-resistant strains of bacteria such as E.coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae, a cause of pneumonia and urinary tract infections, in less than five years.
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Until 2008, there were fewer than five cases a year in the UK of bugs resistant to carbapenem, our most effective intravenous (IV) antibiotic. 
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New statistics reveal how there have been 386 cases already this year, in what the HPA has called a "global public health concern". 
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Doctors are particularly concerned because carbapenems are often the last hope for hospital patients suffering from pneumonia and blood infections that other antibiotics have failed to treat.
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Such cases were unknown in the UK before 2003.
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Years of over-prescribing antibiotics, bought over the counter in some countries, and their intensive use in animals, enabling resistant bacteria to enter the food chain, are among the factors behind the global spread. 
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According to the latest figures from the World Health Organisation, some 25,000 people a year die of antibiotic-resistant infections in the European Union
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In a statement issued during a WHO conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, last week, the organisation warned that doctors and scientists throughout Europe fear the "reckless use of antibiotics" risks a "return to a pre-antibiotic era where simple infections do not respond to treatment, and routine operations and interventions become life-threatening."
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More than 50 countries signed up to a European action plan on antibiotic resistance, unveiled at the conference, which includes recommendations for greater surveillance of antibiotic resistance, stricter controls over the use of antibiotics, and improved infection control in hospitals and clinics.
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We know that now is the time to act. 
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Antibiotic resistance is reaching unprecedented levels, and new antibiotics are not going to arrive quickly enough," said Zsuzsanna Jakab, the WHO Regional Director for Europe. "There are now superbugs that do not respond to any drug," she added.
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Dr Alan Johnson, a clinical scientist and expert in antibiotic resistance at the HPA, warned delegates at its annual conference last week that the problem is making some infections harder and in some, cases, virtually impossible, to treat.
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Speaking to the IoS, he said: "We've had a problem of antibiotic resistance for as long as we've had antibiotics. 
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The big problem at the moment is, for certain types of bacteria, we are seeing problems of resistance emerging and we don't actually have any new antibiotics in the pipeline to deal with them."
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The rise is partially due to certain epidemic strains of bacteria that are well adapted to spreading between people, with the added complication that the genes encoding resistance in bacteria can move between different types, explained Dr Johnson.
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People are largely unaware of the dangers of taking antibiotics, he added. 
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There's been a perception among doctors and the public that antibiotics are quite harmless. 
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What we now know is that if, as an individual, you take a course of antibiotics you will almost certainly end up being colonised by antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the gut, because the bacteria mutate so rapidly. 
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Now they may disappear and not be a problem, or they may sit there and next time you get an infection it could be due to the resistance that has persisted.
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And one of the country's leading experts warned last night that Britain is very close to seeing the first cases of infections that are resistant to all antibiotics
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Professor Tim Walsh, an expert in antibiotic resistance at Cardiff University, said: 
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We are very close to having pan-resistant bacteria in this country. 
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The consequence of this is that we are more or less back to the pre-antibiotic days of the 1920s, so these drugs that we've relied on for so long and taken for granted have now become obsolete because we've become complacent.
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A rise in deaths will almost certainly result, claimed Professor Walsh, with people that have weakened immune systems among those at greatest risk.
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Little is known about the toll on Britons, with the HPA admitting that it does not have "the mortality statistics for this resistance in the UK". 
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It is calling on doctors to exercise caution when using antibiotics, and for hospitals to track cases of antibiotic resistance and stop the spread of the bacteria between patients
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Jonathan Owen

For you

"Hope is the pillar that holds up the world."
Pliny the Elder
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"My religion is very simple, my religion is kindness."
Dalai Lamg
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"Life is like a game of cards. 
The hand that is dealt you represents determinism; the way you play it is free will."
Jawaharial Nehru, 1889-1964
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"The important thing is to not stop questioning."
Albert Einstein, 1879-1955
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"It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes life worth living."
Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1809-1894
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"It's not your circumstances that shape you, it's how you react to your circumstances."
Anne Ortlund
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"For all of us, as we grow older, perhaps the most important thing is to keep alive our love of others and to believe that our love and interest are as vitally necessary to them as to us. 
This is what makes us keep on growing and refills the fountains of energy."
Eleanor Roosevelt
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"The best thing about the future is that it only comes one day at a time."
Abraham Lincoln
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"Sometimes the simplest gesture seems like the biggest showing of kindness possible."
Erica Lynn Dager
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"Peace comes from within. 
Do not seek it without."
Buddha
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"The most I can do for my friend is simply to be a friend."
Henry David Thoreau
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"Wishing to be friends is quick work, but friendship is a slow ripening fruit."
Aristotle
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"It is not the years in your life, but the life in your years that counts the most."
Adlai Stevenson
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"It takes strength to be gentle and kind."
Stephen Morrisey
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"A hero is a person who does what he or she can."
Roman Rolland
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"It is a curious thing in human experience, but to live through a period of stress and sorrow with another person creates a bond which nothing seems able to break."
Eleanor Roosevelt
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"The smallest good deed is better than the grandest intention."
Author Unknown
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"What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matter compared to what lies within us."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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"The best things in life are never rationed.
 Friendship, loyalty, love, do not require coupons."
George T. Hewitt
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"There can be no better exercise for strengthening the heart than reaching down and lifting people up."
Gibson Publishing
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"Where there is unity there is always victory."
Publilius Syrus
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"The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen nor touched, but are felt in the heart."
Gibson Publishing
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"Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under the trees on a spring day, listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time."
Sir. J. Lubbock
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"To be capable of steady friendship or lasting love are the two greatest proofs, not only of goodness of heart, but of strength of mind."
William Hazlitt, 1823

Total avoidance

In Britain political parties have been indulging in their annual conferences.


A time of posturing and booze.


None feel any need to address the drug problem in the UK.


And yes there is a big problem.


Chief amongst these being the high consumption of alcohol.


None of the three parties wish to consider changes to present laws


All would prefer not to notice the injustice and stupidity of those present laws.


Alcohol is legal


Marijuana is not


Tobacco is legal


Cocaine and other recreational drugs are not


All are consumed throughout British society


Alcohol and tobacco account for considerably more cancers, heart attacks, liver problems than all the other drugs combined


Question if cocaine and heroin are illegal then why not alcohol?


That if they do less damage, see various reports on this, then why not legalise them?
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Not one political party will mention the subject of drugs.


Not one is fighting to address the nonsense of current drug policies.


Not one makes any connection with people drinking or doing drugs out of despair at their lives.
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Not one makes any connection with gangs or other anti-social behaviour.


Obviously not one mentions the failure of repeated governments to tackle the causes of higher drug use.


Not one mentions the nonsense of locking young people up in prison for smoking joints while you can legally buy any amount of strong spirits, which are much more harmful


Then we have the PR spin and lies about recreational drugs and their dangers, and then wonder why young people have so little respect for politicians.
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My own thoughts are that we should look at reality objectively.
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Humans have and always will use recreational highs.
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Humans will always look for ways of dulling pains.
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Prohibition does not work.
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Has never worked.
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Locking up and criminalising more and more of society does not seem a very intelligent approach.


Let us now try something different.
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All drugs should be legalised.
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All should be sold with the same strictures as tobacco or alcohol.


All should be treated as health issues and not criminal issues.


We have had enough lies, deceit and avoidance towards this issue.


It will not go away.


It will not get better in our current climate of few jobs for the young, high debt levels for many and the other realities of a country in depression.


British politicians refuse to notice or draw lessons from other countries who have reduced their drug problems substantially through more enlightened policies.
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Why would this be?
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Any one listening?

Keep thinking

Most Christians today believe that we are created at conception and that when we die we become eternal. . But eternity cannot be eternal on one end and finite on the other. . If something has a beginning, it must have an end. . If we believe that we will live forever. . It must follow that we have always existed, as the great Christian teacher Origen taught. . If we have always existed. . What have we been doing all this time? . If one incarnation is helpful in our spiritual evolution, why wouldn't two be twice as useful? . And if each life is to learn one or more major lessons then why not millions of lives? . Certainly it would take a vast number of lives to learn all that there is to learn. . What is it that makes us resist the idea of multiple human lives when a majority of the world's religions include a belief in karma and reincarnation? . We are a part of Nature. . We have always existed. . We will always exist. . Our time in eternity is an evolutionary process through which we are learning how to become at one with nature. . The only way this can be achieved is through an enormous series of positive and negative experiences? . This result cannot be achieved in a single lifetime. . If we are part of Nature, our present life is no more than a short class to learn a certain skill. . And there is more than one course in our spiritual curriculum. . There are myriad questions not answered by our traditional theologies or philosophies. . When do we get to use the wisdom we have accumulated in this life? . Where do we get to correct our mistakes? . If we can correct them in heaven, why did we come here in the first place? . Why should any God punish people eternally for temporal sins? . Do we punish our children for the next fifty years for a penny stolen when they are little?    . What happens to mentally challenged people and those who cannot comprehend the laws of life? . How do we account for the vast discrepancies in the lives of people, some living in poverty, some in great wealth? . At what point does Nature even out these unfair distinctions? . This current life is one of many experiences which you have created for yourself. . Just as you are now designing your own future life. . And while you might not buy into all of the above, what do you believe? . You might not want or care to think about these things now, however they are in your subconscious. . And they will get more voluble as you get older. . As you approach old age and death. . And yes this happens to you too, it's not just other people who grow old! . Quite a smart idea really to find out how things truly are before then. . Shame to get to the end of your life and to realise that you wasted it. . There have been some very smart people on this planet. . Smart enough not to leave dangerous things lying around that could be misused. . So where did they leave their ideas to help us? . In what form? . Where? . And leave things they did. . Ever thought about that?

All change

In 2010, a quarter of births were to mothers born outside the UK, according to the ONS. 
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The same set of statistics also showed that immigration added 239,000 to our population – a number which proves that this Government has no more control over our borders than the last one. 
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The public instinctively senses this. 
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Not so those “live births”.
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If a quarter of all babies born in England and Wales are to foreign mothers, then we’re experiencing the biggest change in our demographic identity since the Anglo-Saxon invasions of the fifth century. 
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Future historians will regard this as the major development in early 21st-century British history. 

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Nothing like this has happened before. 
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Please pay no attention next time a historian pops up on TV to romanticise the arrival of the Normans, Huguenots, Eastern European Jews etc. 
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These were significant influxes, but Great Britain has never been “a nation of immigrants”. 
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Even cosmopolitan London has witnessed nothing remotely comparable to the population shift recorded by the current ONS statistics. 
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More than half of all babies born in the capital in 2010 were to foreign mothers
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In the borough of Newham in London more than three quarters of all new mothers were born abroad.

Another statistic that jumps out of the ONS findings relates to Poles. 
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In 2001, there were 896 babies born to Polish mothers in England and Wales; in 2010, there were 19,762. 
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Meanwhile, births to Middle Eastern, African and Asian mothers amounted to 14.7 per cent – that’s twice the proportion of non-British European mothers. 
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Add that 14.7 per cent to children born to non-white British mothers and within a few years, a quarter of young Britons will be black, Asian or of mixed race.
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In the capital, the total will be well over 50 per cent.
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The colour of people’s skins isn’t the problem, of course. 
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The danger lies in a clash of ethnic and religious cultures against a background of broken families.
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London is already well on the way to turning into a US city, with sprawling black ghettos and a semi-invisible network of foreign white gangs.
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Organised crime from Eastern Europe, one of the most powerful forces in the world today, has only just begun to flex its muscles in Britain.

Alas, as the riots proved, we don’t have a clue how to police this emerging landscape.


And, let’s face it, with the present coalition government thrashing about  we’re not likely to find out. 
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So watch this space, but from a safe distance.
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Britain is changing fast however our politicians are not able or prepared to confront the need for policies to reflect the demands of these changing times.
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Preferring instead to lock up ever more young people.
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To criminalise ever more citizens.
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As we say watch this space, but from a safe distance.

A reason to drink wine

For those who need one!
Drinking wine could help to stop sunburn
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Drinking wine or eating grapes could protect you from sunburn, according to a new study that found a chemical in the fruit can limit cell damage.
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Ultraviolet (UV) rays emitted by the sun are the leading cause of cellular damage and premature ageing
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They are also a cause of skin complaints
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Sun burn and even skin cancer.
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But in another nod towards the healthy mediteranean diet, Spanish scientists found substances in the grapes protect cells from the damage.
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Already cosmetic companies are registering interest in the hope of making sun creams or pills that copy the process.
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The University of Barcelona and the Spanish National Research Council looked at the chemical reaction in the skin when hit by UV rays from the sun.
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They found that flavonoids in the grapes can stop the chemical reaction that causes cells to die and therefore skin damage.
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The study, carried out in vitro in the laboratory, has been published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.
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Marta Cascante, a biochemist at the University of Barcelona and director of the research project, said it proves grapes could help protect the skin from sun burn and even skin cancer.
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She said the research could help to develop skin creams and other products to protect skin from sun damage.
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This study supports the idea of using these products to protect the skin from cell damage and death caused by solar radiation, as well as increasing our understanding of the mechanism by which they act", she said.
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The study also adds to the popular image of the healthy and tanned population of the Mediterranean.
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Previous research has put the low cancer rates and good health down to tomatoes, olive oil and even red wine.
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So for those who like wine another defence for those asking you "what for you drink wine?"