Maybe it was just coincidence in a slow news week. Time Magazine came out with a cover story headlined “Busybodies & Crybabies: What’s Happening to the American Character?” and the same week the feminists launched a media initiative called the “Glass Ceiling.”
Time described how the busybodies, those self-appointed, overbearing wardens of behavior and political correctness, are infecting American society with a nasty intolerance. Pitted against the busybodies, according to Tine, are the crybabies, those who position themselves as victims, blaming everybody for their problems except themselves.
The peddlers of this new industry called “victimology” argue that every plight, condition or momentary setback is not a matter to be solved by individual effort but is a social problem in itself. The victims’ “greatest talent,” according to Time, is the ability to hand out guilt, and indeed they are adept at using every tool of modern communication and law courts to dump the blame on others.
A good example of the crybabies was an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times a couple of months ago written by a young woman complaining that, although she is “young, urban, professional, literate, respectable, intelligent and charming,” she is unemployed. She realizes that plenty of jobs are available, but she thinks it is “absurd” that she should take a job beneath her expectations such as a typist, so she and her unemployed peers have “bounced checks to keep ourselves in oxford shirts and Ann Taylor dresses.”
“We expect rewards and reeognition,” she says. For what, Miss Crybaby? Al Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, says that 90 percent, of those who go to college today are only learning what their parents learned in high school.
One thing Time didn’t report on was the way that busybodies and crybabies cooperate with each other to achieve their goals. The bureaucratic busybodies who want to use the power of government to direct our lives always need new groups of victims in order to rationalize expanding their regulatory turf and spending more of the taxpayers’ money; and the crybabies are always glad to have a government agency sanctify their status as victims.
The Glass Ceiling initiative is a good example (not mentioned by Time, of course) of how busybodies and crybabies work in tandem. The crybabies are the feminists who think they should, dt the very least, be vice presidents of Fortune 500 corporations, and the busybodies are their pals who want to use the affirmative action power of the Federal Government to place them there.
Glass Ceiling is the feminists’ code word for affirmative action quotas for executive women, just as “civil rights” has become the code word for affirmative action quotas for minorities. A Glass Ceiling proposal is part of the controversial Civil Rights Act which President Bush has promised to veto.
“Quota” is a semantic no-no now, so everybody denies wanting quotas. However, the 25-page U.S. Department of Labor Glass Ceiling report released last week is filled with carrot-and-stick quota rhetoric.
This Department of Labor report pledges that the government will “assist mountain of paperwork to defend their personnel decisions, white males firms in meeting their affirmative action obligations,” an “assistance” that companies don’t want. Promotions of women are expressed in numerical percentages, layers of guilt are heaped on corporations for not promoting, more women and for not producing a are devalued (you’re going to be “only 15 percent” of the growth in the U.S. workforce), and companies are promised special rewards for promoting more women (it’s irrelevant whether the women deserved the promotions or whether the company prospers).
The report talks about the Department’s plans to remove “artificial barriers.” But the chief barrier is not artificial but the result of women’s own choices. The Yankelovich survey found that a majority of women (55 percent) would quit their jobs permanently if money were not a factor — a dramatic shift in opinion from the previous year.
The attitudes of executive and professional women are even more striking. A survey conducted by the executive recruiting firm Robert Half international found that 82 percent of the professional career women surveyed said they would choose a career path with flexible hours, more family tine, and slower career advancement rather than a more demanding path with faster advancement.
In other words, the typical ’90s woman wants the mommy track, not the fast track. That’s why we are having a boom in home-based. employment and in births to women in their ‘30s and ‘40s.
Reaching the top echelons of big corporations requires 20 to 30 years of 60 to 80-hour work weeks, extraordinary motivation, and commitment to a lifetime in the labor force. The majority of women do not make that choice.
