Glacier surfing. Interesting.

I’ve had several conversations, with friends and family as well as students (tangentially), about the peculiar extent of leisure activities in our modern lives. For most of us, with so much time and income beyond the basic, we have to find something to keep us from spending it all on cheese and an XBox. Which makes sense. It’s a way of that for me was so much the norm I didn’t begin to really think critically of it until college, and a few girlfriends whose ideas of vacations weren’t being cold in the woods and tearing skin off on rocks caused me to reexamine my ways (and decide to not change them).

But, try to convince an inner city teenager that hiking, or almost anything (with the possible exception of basketball) physically strenuous is a worthwhile leisure activity. I have not had much success. It’s a cultural, and educational divide to be sure. And yet, given the fairly broad segment of the economic continuum we possess here at work, the fact that poorer backgrounds tend to equal increased physical laziness is for me largely inarguable.

Being a child of privledge my entire life, I make this harsh assertion with unease.