The Duck of Minerva

Happy Boxing Day!

by Charli Carpenter

26 December 2008, 2028 EST

Yeh, I just can’t stop celebrating all the awesome holidays at this time of year. Boxing Day, celebrated throughout the Commonwealth, has in many places become a version of Black Friday, but the true point of the holiday, of course, is to reverse roles with those higher or lower on the power chain than oneself. (Though, in our house we’ve never quite figured out how to let the kids take over our roles and still maintain a semblance of functionality around here… thoughts ye parent-readers of this blog?)

Anyway, I like Justin Callaway’s recipe for incorporating Boxing Day into America’s hoiday reportoire:

“Legislative members of both houses of Congress must find a family in the “final throes” of foreclosure within their electoral base and switch places with them for the remainder of their luxuriously long winter vacations. During this time, these families will not only have access to their elected representative’s federal health benefits, but they will also be given the identical weekly personal budget that each of these Senate and Congressional members has at their regular disposal, including any housing and vacation rentals. Conversely, each Legislator and his/her family must try and figure out how they are going to survive for the next couple of weeks, while avoiding being evicted from their foreclosed housing situation and trying to find food within the other family’s limited economic means.”

Read the rest here, and, cheerio.

Charli Carpenter is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She is the author of 'Innocent Women and Children': Gender, Norms and the Protection of Civilians (Ashgate, 2006), Forgetting Children Born of War: Setting the Human Rights
Agenda in Bosnia and Beyond (Columbia, 2010), and ‘Lost’ Causes: Agenda-Setting in Global Issue Networks and the Shaping of Human Security (Cornell, 2014). Her main research interests include national security ethics, the protection of civilians, the laws of war, global agenda-setting, gender and political violence, humanitarian affairs, the role of information technology in human security, and the gap between intentions and outcomes among advocates of human security.

Charli Carpenter is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She is the author of 'Innocent Women and Children': Gender, Norms and the Protection of Civilians (Ashgate, 2006), Forgetting Children Born of War: Setting the Human Rights
Agenda in Bosnia and Beyond (Columbia, 2010), and ‘Lost’ Causes: Agenda-Setting in Global Issue Networks and the Shaping of Human Security (Cornell, 2014). Her main research interests include national security ethics, the protection of civilians, the laws of war, global agenda-setting, gender and political violence, humanitarian affairs, the role of information technology in human security, and the gap between intentions and outcomes among advocates of human security.

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