Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 858-861

Christopher Browning’s collection of essays, “The Path to Genocide,” notes that it was the “moderate,” “normal” bureaucrats, not the zealots, who made the Holocaust possible. Germaine Tillion pointed out “the tragic easiness [during the Holocaust] with which ‘decent’ people could become the most callous executioners without seeming to notice what was happening to them.” The Russian novelist Vasily Grossman in his book “Forever Flowing” observed that “the new state did not require holy apostles, fanatic, inspired builders, faithful, devout disciples. The new state did not even require servants—just clerks.”
Chris Hedges
The Careerists

If you live in America in the 21st century you’ve probably had to listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are. It’s become the default response when you ask anyone how they’re doing: “Busy!” “So busy.” “Crazy busy.” It is, pretty obviously, a boast disguised as a complaint.
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Notice it isn’t generally people pulling back-to-back shifts in the I.C.U. or commuting by bus to three minimum-wage jobs  who tell you how busy they are; what those people are is not busy but tired. Exhausted. Dead on their feet.
The ‘Busy’ Trap
By TIM KREIDER
New York Times
June 30, 2012

This faulty association of work with virtue hits the nail on the head. Why should we prioritize work above spending time with our families, or in the sunshine, or consuming art? With frequency, we glibly declare that at the end of our lives we will remember the latter group of activities more fondly than the former, but we seem reluctant to embrace that ethos in the here and now.
How Less Work for Everybody Could Solve a Lot of Our Economic Turbulence and Make Life More Pleasant
AlterNet / By Sarah Seltzer
[emphasis JS]