R. Bruce Anderson
One of the weird effects of having been on “vacation” is that you are supposed to be “away from work.”
I don’t know anyone who is ever truly away from work anymore. We all live lives that require us to worry about work in the evenings, on the weekends. Your colleagues and customers and can reach you at any time, and the overwhelming dominance of cell phones and the emails and social media (to say nothing of actual phone calls, rare though they are) that come with them ramps up your accessibility to others who constantly remind you that a vacation is never really a true “vacate” order.
As a political scientist, all this has a bizarre angle for me: Every time the daily USA Today slams into your motel room door, it arrives with “work.” Go down for breakfast and you are greeted with a 50-foot screen of CNN/FOX and “work” to go with your crappy coffee.
For the past three weeks, even the Weather Channel has been feeding it. The fires out west have blanketed the midsection of the country with a never-ending haze. So even if you are out of the danger of immediate immolation, you are directed to worry about climate change, if not imminent lung implosion from the “particulate matter” swirling through the air.
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Before I departed, I took the usual precautions: I stopped the daily delivery to my inbox of all press releases, clicked on a vacation notice to “autoreply” to emails, jammed my “notifications” to the leanest setting, and crossed my fingers. I also made the delete button my best friend – especially for those “alerts” from “The 45th President of the United States,” and also “muted” the Facebook junk from the “Democrats of (my) County” as well as all the “Republican Clubs” (how many do we have now? Are you folks fighting?). I tried to weed out anything coming in titled “masks,” and “vaccine,” but found that eliminating “COVID” as a key word meant receiving nothing at all.
I had to make some tradeoffs from the start. I settled for notices from my hometown newspaper (got to keep an eye on stuff the local politicos might try to slip past while I was away) and the morning feed from AP.
I replied to students when they chimed in and wished friends “happy birthday/anniversary/new baby” (since no vacation voids our responsibility to recognize and celebrate such things). I avoided political memes as though they carried electronic athlete’s foot – and “liked” pictures of puppies and kittens and palm trees on beaches.
I tried to choose music for the road that avoided politics (for someone whose playlists still primarily play The Clash, The Pogues and The Dead Kennedys, this was a challenge). I tried to make them region-specific, rediscovering Roy Acuff while in Tennessee – good ole-time gospel without a lot of political implications. It was a simpler time.
Radio was out of the question, of course – heaven knows what gibberish you are likely to be exposed to – so I tried audio books for the long hauls between my geographically distant family members. Which was fine, until “reading” a book about the Persian Empire I suddenly had to grapple with what seemed to be a long disquisition paralleling George Bush the younger and the Great King Xerxes. Ambuscaded by academics.
And of course there were actual people. I was raised in a family swimming in opinions. As children, we all yelled and argued and debated about politics. Not surprisingly on this series of visits, I found this has not abated one iota in the intervening years.
The final thunder is that I cannot avoid my work. Politics permeates every facet of my life, at least on some level, and there are few times I’d have it any different. But when one is contemplating the superb beauty of a Colorado peak after a long hike up, sometimes you’d rather not be discussing the success – or failure – of their marijuana laws.
R. Bruce Anderson is the Dr. Sarah D. and L. Kirk McKay, Jr. Endowed Chair in American History, Government, and Civics and Miller Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Florida Southern College He is also a columnist for The Ledger and political consultant and on-air commentator for WLKF Radio.
