Word: reiche
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...Robert Reich is retiring for the best of reasons: he wants to spend more time with his family. He has found that balancing work and family is simply impossible. Not that he hasn't tried. We can imagine the poor sod, armed to the teeth with daily planners and cellular phones, trying to be there for everyone. Reich, our nation's Secretary of Labor, wrote of his decision to step down from the Cabinet for the Op-Ed page of the New York Times last Friday...
...Reich's piece does not have the same varnished air of much of this writing. The article is conversational, almost bubbly, with the triumphant tone of the moral high ground piping in the background. Reich knows that he has done the right thing. He's made the choice to spend more time with his family without being forced to by sickness or a depressed labor market...
...doubt about it, there is substance to Reich's piece. If we cannot find the story of the poor man here, working 14-hour days to earn a starving wage for his children, then it is because Reich is no poor man. In fact, the tension in Reich's life and in the Times piece is drawn between the joys of work and the joys of family. He suffers from an overbundance; his cup runneth over. For many Harvard students, Reich's story is familiar. We worry about making the right choices in a sea of opportunity...
...Reich's advice is much better suited to us than the tired family values rhetoric of the one-sided contemporary political debate. Reich, we must remember, is the Secretary of Labor. He Understands work; he has spent much of his career thinking about work. As a result, Reich does not pit the soulless company man once again against the smiling, tanned familydad. Rather his portrait of the workaholic is sympathetic: "They love their job and find the world of spouse and kids harder to manage...
...know that work does not have to be humdrum. We know that it takes time, and usually solitude, to write and to think. Reich understands us. He knows that it is not an easy thing to drop one's work, even for one's family. Ultimately, though, he chose to spend more time with his family, and he clearly feels good about this. Still, there is a hint of desperation and ambiguity in his voice; we get the feeling that there's more going on here than meets...