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Americans may get long school holidays, but they pay a high price later on.
Joanne Black
My Southern Hemisphere DNA is so strong that I feel I should start putting up Christmas decorations because my daughter’s school year has just finished.
I have not yet got my head around the concept of a year ending in mid-June, let alone a new one beginning in September. By whose reckoning is that time span a “year”? Here, shops are now filling with calendars and diaries that run from August for either 12 months to next July or, more often, 17 months until December next year.
Schools’ summer vacation here is longer even than summer holidays in New Zealand. I think if I were a school pupil studying a foreign language in the US, by the time I returned to school at the end of summer I would have forgotten not only every verb conjugation I ever knew but which language I was learning.
The length of the vacation goes a long way to explaining why American kids go off to summer camps. Most working parents could not hope to cover the holidays by taking time off.
Annual leave is often just two weeks, and in many workplaces, if you are in a senior position and want to show your dedication, you would not take all your leave, because to do so may indicate that you do not take your career seriously.
Of course, it might also indicate that you were normal, but that may matter less than career advancement. There is no statutory minimum period of paid leave in the US, and generally the lowest earners are also the least likely to have paid leave, even though they may be doing some of the worst jobs.
The US is a peculiar country in some ways. A person’s right to carry a firearm is much more successfully and passionately defended than the right to have paid leave. It sure pays to make the most of your vacations as a kid. They may be the only long holidays some Americans ever have.
Plenty of people in public life could take lessons from the way Melania Trump has conducted herself since her husband, Donald, shocked the world and probably ruined his wife’s life by accidentally becoming President of the United States. “Accidentally” seems an appropriate description, because surely he, like the rest of us, never thought it was really going to happen.
As a model, Melania was well trained for the role she finds herself in. About a generation ago, models smiled. But then came the post-lobotomy look of no animation whatsoever except, occasionally, a look of wistful pining perhaps for a long-remembered meal of more than 100 calories. Enigmatic would be the polite way to describe the expression, though “vacant” might be more accurate.
Whatever it’s called, Melania has perfected the art of giving nothing of herself away. She took this a little far in the notorious speech in which she appeared to reveal her thoughts, but they turned out to belong to her predecessor, Michelle Obama.
Maybe that was apt. Perhaps every First Spouse of the United States thinks the same thing: “How the hell did I end up here?” And then “What am I supposed to do now?” followed by “We’re going to Saudi Arabia? You’re kidding me!”
But if Melania thinks that and even though she looks as though she thinks that, she smiles and waves like she was born into the royal family. Zip it, smile, wave. If only a little of that would rub off on her husband.
Perhaps every First Spouse of the US thinks the same thing: “How the hell did I end up here?”