Poem: South Ward
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Poem: South Ward

ByJeff Rich

I have made many visits to mental health hospitals over the years, almost all of them in support of my mother who suffered for most of her adult life from severe mental illness. The experience of these institutions humbles the mind. It teaches us how each of us is a “preposterous hodgepodge, uniquely arranged” – in the words of the great Inga Clendinnen who knew the gulf between the experience of the well and the sick – “a more significant division in any society than class or gender or possibly even homelessness.”

On the history and meaning of the eight hour day
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On the history and meaning of the eight hour day

ByJeff Rich

The story I told in this article still has resonance for me. It was a story about how, even in the apparently material conditions that defined work and industrial conflict, the meaning of events were inseparable from the striving for recognition and the webs of significance that we, culture-making beings, weave through the time of our lives.