`Family values' vs. Blue Laws

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

So, how long have we been listening to our politicians pontificate about "family values?"

The phrase has been on everyone's lips for the past year, but the concept has existed forever. The family - it's sacrosanct. It's the bedrock of the nation. If we could get the family back together, make it strong, then the country would follow.

No more broken homes would lead to no more crime, no more poverty, no more dysfunctional children running around shooting and stabbing one another. Let there be peace on earth and let it begin in the home.

How this talk fires up people, makes them recognize what's important. The flag, mom and apple pie. Yes! Children learn in the home. Yes! Of course! The family is a vital social unit. Everything that happens in it affects a child forever. If a family is messed up, then the country will be messed up.

We hear this stuff constantly: The family has to value itself. The family has to come together. The family has to stand tall and lead the world.

But when? When do families have time to be, never mind grow, develop, interact and lead, not as separate souls, but as one strong unit? How can a family bond when it doesn't have time to connect? How can a family lead when all its members are going in different directions?

Homes these days are more like train stations. They're places where people go to change on their way to or from somewhere else.

Families need time the way human beings need food and water and air. They need time when everyone is under the same roof. Time to get a fix on things. Time to check in, to touch base: How was your day, your week? What's happening? Is life treating you okay? Are you okay?

It used to be that families connected at least on Sundays. Mom cooked a meal, and the family sat down and ate. It was a command performance. You had to be home for Sunday dinner.

There were nightly dinners, too. Dads came home, and doors closed throughout the neighborhood and families interacted behind those doors. We were our own biospheres.

All this has changed, now. Families don't have time to sit and eat together. It's catch as catch can. Take-out from sea to shining sea. Mom works. Dad works - and not just at work, but all the time. There's shopping, cleaning, cooking those easy-to-fix, reheatable meals. There's always something to do, some place to be - soccer, baseball, dancing, meetings, paying the bills, sorting the trash, buying birthday cards.

The only time out is Sunday morning and it's hardly a time out at all. Millions of people sleep through it, and for millions more it doesn't even apply. But it's something, a tiny intermission, the last remnant of family time.

Sunday morning is the only time you don't feel as if you have to be doing something. It's a time to go to church, play softball, work in the garden, linger over breakfast, read the papers.

Tragically, this last vestige of civilized living is going to be axed. If not this year, next year because we need "to grow the economy," you know. Never mind about the family. That's just political posturing. Never mind about anything but money.

The Weld administration, which filed legislation Friday to allow retail stores and supermarkets to open their doors Sunday mornings and on all summer holidays, figures the extra shopping time would generate an additional $15 million in tax revenue for the state.

It's ironic, isn't it? Here's the government constantly saying we should be spending more time with our children, reading to them, inculcating morals in their still-malleable minds. Then it works to take away the only bit of free time a family has.

When the Blue Laws were changed the first time around, I swore up and down I'd never shop on Sunday. Remember "thou keep holy the Sabbath." And I would.

But I didn't. I go to the grocery store, Lechmere, the mall. I go, go, go for as long as I can, and I don't stop until I have to.

But we need to stop. We need to give at least as much time to this unit we call family as we do to the Sunday circulars. For all work and no play doesn't just make Jack dull. It blunts the spirit that is the essence of family.