Time is the most used noun in the English language [1], says the new Oxford Dictionary.
Most abused too?

Have you noticed Big Government and Big Business have effectively taken over all our time, one way or another? -- colluding to micromanage jobs and markets, most of which become ossified and inescapable School requirements 'round the clock and calendar [2]:

Back to School: A Time to Rethink Time
By Milton Chen

Another year has passed, and schools are still captives of an outdated calendar. . .

The news (why do we call it that? Because we're controlled by TIME!) often makes me want to stage a clock-and calendar burning on the steps of some capitol building -- anywhere in the western world will do.

Time that used to belong between doctors and patients belongs to the UK government now [3]. Busy bureaucrats do random appointment book checks, to guarantee every individual an appointment on either short or long notice, 48-hours being the magic time of demarcation, yada yada (another Oxford term in the news.)

Guess it takes an army of tax-paid time-managers messing with our appointments, to keep everybody's time "accountable" to everybody else as the deserving public.

A system of random checks to ensure GPs are not fiddling appointment times
is being introduced by the government:

"All patients should have fast access to a GP every working day of the month.
"At the same time, practices need to offer advance appointments.
There must be no excuses or exceptions."
--Lord Warner

Don't think that case is special because it's a matter of life and death. When time control laws afflict even neighbors who wait too long between hedge clipping, surely the UK has lost the war for time freedom, and probably because its public has lost the love of it, turning it into just another weapon against their neighbors. Don't we all have a neighbor who knows better than we do what the government must force us by law to do?

The keeper of my time is my keeper.

Of course, the history of time and all its connections can be very cool. I'm not pro- or anti- time or money, or history for that matter. I'm just sayin'. I appreciate nature and serendipity, and also love order, planning, and the ability to delay personal gratification with reasonable confidence that it IS coming, that I can count on it for later. I'm highly functional and even creative with both time and money, but I think it's TIME I stopped to think about what the heck I've really been doing all this time, and who's keeping time by, for and with me. [4]

If love of money is the root of all evil, the taming of time must surely be its minion.
Now (time reference, ha!) let's play a little "accountability" game, just for fun, not for government approval -- see if you can count all the references to time obscure or obvious, just in this news excerpt about the time it takes hedges to grow, and the time it takes to cut them again:

"It's high time for hedge law" [5]

. . .This is not through a lack of political will.
Virtually all of Scotland's MSPs are itching to support a Bill to end the unfairness, cruelty and expense of the mismanaged march of hedges. In 2001, Jim Wallace, then Justice Minister, said legislation was an appropriate solution to the problem. But by 2003, England was ahead of us, when Westminster passed laws requiring local authorities to arbitrate in such cases and to issue remedial orders.

Now we are hoping that . . . Scott Barrie's High Hedges (Scotland) Bill, first mooted in 2000, will be included as an amendment (giving) councils the power to intervene if a row between neighbours reaches an impasse...a face to face war whose outcome has nothing to do with communal equity.

Scotland's high hedge victims have waited so long that a Leylandii hedge will have grown another six metres since the first High Hedges Bill saw the light of day in 2000. The Executive Planning Etc Bill may be a passing bus ready to take on board an amendment, but it runs on time and will not wait for stragglers. Nearly all MSPs have hedge-blighted constituents crying out for help.
If the opportunity is missed then the May 2007 elections will not come soon enough.

Time (yes, that's another one, see what I mean??) for grading. Switch papers. Did you catch "reaches" as in reaches an impasse? Before today (that's another one!) I would've skipped that as a physical reference, reaching with arms or a vehicle, but no, reaching an impasse isn't physical, it's all a matter of TIME. Did you get "passing" in passing bus? Yada yada.

I read a science fiction story about a man who became obsessed with his physical skeleton, his bones inside his body, and the more he thought about them and wondered if they were holding up, the more he became convinced they were dissolving right out from under him, and either he was singularly correct and the horror was real before he began to believe it, or the belief created the reality as he made it a self-fulfilling prophecy by focusing on it. It hardly mattered which, once he quite literally dissolved from the inside out.

THE OCTOBER COUNTRY'S inhabitants live, dream, work, die--and sometimes live again--discovering, often too late, the high price of citizenship. [6] Here a glass jar can hold memories and nightmares; a woman's newborn child can plot murder; and a man's skeleton can war against him. . .

It's a old story now, I read it in school, but still you can see in this blurb that time and money thing screaming through, and I quote: "too late" is the "high price of citizenship." Follow the time and money. Maybe our most critical loss of freedom to government is the TIME lost, the definition of ourselves as already too late, that is too high a price for citizenship, not the dammed money into which we're taught from birth it translates.

Can our own social skeletons turn against us, have they done already, and now we're just starting to notice? Is this the beginning or end of the story? Will the government make the doctors see us before it's too late, or is "too late" already metastasized throughout our lives and systems, what ails us in the first place? Physician heal thyself.

If time is the skeletal dimension that supports all human experience of life, and we can feel it dissolving out from under us, then is it time to measure the rate of decline and and apportione blame and retribution even as we dissolve, or is the only accountability that counts STOPPING it somehow?!

My daughter and I read a feminist mind-bending book,"A Sideways Look at Time," in which Jay Griffiths powerfully argues that both Church and State have used time ruthlessly and intentionally to enslave women and children, taking our pagan wildtime that once belonged freely to our own lives, and tightly regulating every minute of it one way or another, altering our rhythms and cycles -- insinuating lordly controls in the words of our common language, into what we're taught as fact both at home and in school, invisibly shaping how we interact as friends and partners and parents and children. In this view of "time" as a noun, it is a synonym for oppression.

Hear her NPR interview along with this snippet of ever-timely cultural power of story [7]:

Music historian Will Friedwald talks with Steve Paulson about "As Time Goes By" and why we love it.
He describes its use in "Casablanca" and the various ways it's been sung since.
And of course, we hear examples.

I'm melting, I'm melting . . .
What is a prison sentence or job, traffic school, summer school, all school, the military draft or income taxes, required yard maintenance and community service, after all, but a taking of your time? The only thing that makes it less threatening to our freedom is the degree to which we give our time rather than having it taken by force, as a stay-at-home mom like me does perhaps, or the way my 12-year-old nephew Philip plays championship baseball, in the moment and temporal eternity all at the same time.

Amateur means doing something for the love of it, pouring your own time, money and will into it rather than being paid and being held accountable for doing it to a certain standard by external rule. So "as time goes by" amateur music-making that once meant making music for love rather than money, has come to mean not acceptably standardized in the view of those with the money, who naturally are deemed those best qualified to judge it.

While amateur has been devalued, no word or phrase in the new Oxford Dictionary now means, "mandated music-making on penalty of law" - yet! Patronizing might come close, supporting with money in return for control, not a meaning I'd ever seek out for the love of it, talk about "compromising positions!" Maybe music mandated by law is impossible in fact, hence impossible linguistically, that something deep within the essence of music-making cannot reconcile with force or servitude, I want to think more about that. Music can be a form of unrestricted expression if not outright rebellion IN servitude,we know that, but is music-making itself ever subject to government controls?

I once was a professional educator. Put in my time; take out my money. (Well, actually -- take out YOUR money, money the government took from you and gave to me, so I could take your kids and drive them to market, then give them back to you well-harnessed within the belief that time and money controls are good for them and a progressive form of freedom.) It is anger-making, resentment-churning, meddling, isolating, pervasively political work, being a professional time-and-money regulator.

Or at least it was for me.

Now I am amateur again, teaching and learning more than ever, thinking and expressing my best ideas and finding new ones in collegial collaboration, for the love of it. I put in my time and take out my joy, and the "benefits" are better than anything I found in steady government work. I've got plenty to share, but only if you're interested in doing things differently and without govenment passing any more laws to make either one of us do it, or prevent us from loving it.

Time and money. It used to be our money that I saw government grabbing. I'd hear those little items about Tax Freedom Day moving later [8] and later into April and then May, the day when we'd collectively finished our labor for the State and were blessedly "free" to self-determine our own pursuits and choices for the rest of the calendar cycle. What a silly story to believe, I see now. That was about both time and money --of course, they are inseparable! -- but somehow I didn't notice. The money made the time matter, only because the time made the money. Time was money and the feds were taking so much of it when I was working so hard. But now that I'm off the School assembly line, the cash lobby to save the world, I see their time being taken from little kids long before they understand money, or time, or can possibly be justified as economic engines for society, at least not in any society claiming to be free and enlightened, making progress toward human rights rather than regressing into might makes right.

Maybe because I never took the time to stop and think that it was as much about time as money -- you didn't either, none of us did, it seems -- now Government's got both well in hand, our time AND our money, harnessed in intricate tandem that's supposed to be good for us. The heavier the hands on the bits cutting into our tongues, the better off we are, the safer and more efficient, says the ruling class. They teach it in School now, right on schedule.

I guess it's time to study up on feudal systems and start thinking about how to market them as progressive public accountability to make our kids "better off than we were" in this very new, very old century.

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