RATIONALIZING PUBLIC HOLIDAYS

The Spiritual Shouter Baptist holiday on Thursday last (30th March) gave me pause to think. Apart from the fact that it certainly is a well deserved recognition of this small, but important, faith and the role that it played in the development of our country, it is extremely important that we recognize and acknowledge the  roles that these small groups (faiths) have made to the society. But then I got to thinking: how many of us have had a birthday fall on , say, a Tuesday but have celebrated it on the week-end with friends and family? I would venture to suggest that just about every adult on the planet has done this at least once in his/her lifetime. After all, what is important is the acknowledgement and celebration of the person's birth (which is more important than the actual day itself).

So, I got to thinking: there are many religious public holidays (e.g., Christmas, Divali, Eid ul Fitr, etc.) which can't be moved for rather obvious reasons. But what about those public holidays that can be moved such as Spiritual Shouter Baptists Day, Emancipation Day, Labour Day, etc.? Why don't we celebrate them on, say, a particular Monday in the relevant month? That way we would all get the benefit of a long week-end, the particular event (e.g., emancipation) could be still celebrated and the particular section of society (e.g., the Spiritual Baptists) could still be honoured and acknowledged.

If we rationalized our public holidays and moved them to a particular Monday in the relevant month an immediate benefit to the Society as a whole would be an increase in production as many studies have shown that when a holiday falls on, say, a Tuesday or a Thursday there are more people who simply make the weekend a long one and take the relevant Monday or Friday off. Of course, there is a very large proportion of the work force that don't do this, but if we're being truthful we will recognize that there are a lot of people who do indulge in this practice. In other words, production would be affected positively. 

Sometimes we need to understand that not all of our problems require political solutions. Oftentimes some of our problems can be solved and things made better by the application of some good old commonsense. Oh! Its obviously more fun to blame the "other side". But sometimes the "other side" really didn't create the problem in the first place and simply went along with the original thinking that experience has shown is more than a little wonky. And our collective goal ought to be thinking about how to make our country more efficient and consequently a better place to live.