When I was young I would spend my summers in a town that had Blue Laws. A Blue Law was one that forced everything to close except those businesses that provided certain things deemed necessities. These businesses included pharmacies, grocery stores, restaurants, gas stations and movie theaters. Everything else was pretty much closed up tight. The day of closure was of course Sunday.
The town where all was prohibited on Sunday had been established as a Methodist summer retreat. Sitting right on the Atlantic, it was the bastion of the Protestant middle class. On top of the town being closed on Sunday, the Lord’s Day, it was a dry town. You couldn’t buy liquor there, you could possess it in you home and you could drink it on your porch. However, you could not take it into your yard or out onto the street. Liquor stores were at the base of the bridges that led into this barrier island.
When I was young I chaffed at the patriarchal imposition of the Lord’s Day of rest on all of us who were not of the Methodist flock. Eventually a court agreed and struck down the laws acting based on the separation of church and state. With the doors flung open you can now eat elephant ears and funnel cake and whatever kind of fried and sugared dough you want just before you get on the Wall of Death. Always eat the soft stuff before the rides, it does much less damage coming up. You can vie for giant stuffed animals at the games of chance. You can buy overpriced t-shirts and other garb at all the shop. You can shop for anything.
Blue laws didn’t apply just to my little town. Up until my children were born, most of the Province of Ontario observed similar restrictions on commercial activity on Sunday. What this meant was that if you were going to holiday in Toronto you aimed to be there on a Friday and a Saturday. Sunday was your travel day back because there was not jack to do in TO. Those Blue Laws are gone too.
The world has changed. We live in a society of instant everything. There is no down time, there are no moments for reflection. Any possible quiet moments of our lives suffer from the intrusion of commerce and social contact every minute that we are awake. We are never not on high alert for incoming data and were are never afforded/forced to take downtime.
We are stressed. We are frazzled. We never get a quiet moment to think. Self help books and psychologists talk about mindfulness and urge us to take to the mat for 5, 10 or 20 minutes. But does anyone really do this, well hell no. We are on our collective last nerve as a people. I think we need enforced quietude.
Pick a day of the week. It doesn’t have to be any faith’s equivalent of the sabbath. Just pick a day. Put into place a ban on commerce that day. The stuff of necessity gas, food, medicines would be available. However everything else would have to grind to a halt. I think we also need to shut down social media and Amazon for that day. We need idle minds, we need idle hands. We need to regain our balance. If everyone has to do it, nobody is at a competitive disadvantage.
If we had some breathing room, some time to think without the constant buzzing in our ears of work and the web, we might think about things that are important. We might work our way through the Gordian knot of our political gridlock. We might talk to our neighbors. We might come to common understandings. Hey I know this will never happen but a person can dream.
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