Here’s a sad story for you, straight out of “The Grapes of Wrath”: A homeless bricklayer profiled in the Bibleburg Gaslight on Monday was found dead outside his tipi on Thanksgiving morning — four days before the story ran.
Ray Medina, 53, told reporter Carlyn Ray Mitchell that he came to Bibleburg three years ago from Function Junction, hunting construction work at Fort Cartoon. Four months ago he moved to the banks of Fountain Creek, living first in a tent, then in the tipi. He gave the tent to a camp mate once the tipi was finished.
“None of us really want to be here,” Medina told the G. “I’m hoping (construction) will pick back up, hopefully in the spring.”
Added officer Dan McCormack with the Bibleburg Police Department’s Homeless Outreach Team: “He was convinced he was going to get a job and get off the street. Obviously his plans weren’t working out for him.”
Lots of plans are failing to reach fruition these days. Paul Krugman writes that there are six times as many of us looking for work as there are job openings, “and the average duration of unemployment — the time the average job-seeker has spent looking for work — is more than six months, the highest level since the 1930s.”
Here in Bibleburg, the unemployment rate is hovering at 7.5 percent, a slight improvement over the first half of the year attributed not to an improving economic climate, but to discouraged job-seekers dropping out of the labor market because there is no work.
So many tipis; so little hope.
Mad Blog Media 
That is sad but probably typical. Someone please explain to me how exactly we are going to get out of this deep recession. Smoke and mirrors now allowed.
I guess it depends on what you define as getting out of the recession, eh? If it means will the US go back to insane real estate prices, dodgy loans for all kinds of useless crap and just “more, more, more” as the mantra, I’d say we’re never going to get “over” the recession. The folks calling it the reckoning are more accurate. Folks will think before they spend and the unemployment rate will take a long time to go down. Amazingly, in Italy it seems the govt will subsidize putting solar panels on your roof along with giving serious rebates on the price of bicycles and electric scooters. We just came back from seeing lots of solar panel “farms” under construction there. Meanwhile we in the USA seem to have only an endless supply of loot to dole out to Wall Street, the auto industry and the military-industrial complex. Jeez, can we even get a decent health-care bill passed in our “advanced” country?
Never bought into all that crap, Larry.
I think we are going to have to scale back our lifestyles to a sustainable level. Sustainable both economically and environmentally. Kicking and screaming.
Actually, BombTown has recently added another low flow turbine to the Abiquiu Dam and we are planning a solar electricity farm over the now filled in landfill. But unfortunately, these are small change compared to the McMansion/Ford Expedition lifestyles that have been desired by too many Americans. The coal fired plants near Four Corners will continue to pollute.
Even if a reckoning brings some reality checks, there is no guarantee that recovery will involve economic or social justice. Will we ever make anything in America again that can be exported or sold to each other so we can have decent, sustainable, widespread jobs? I don’t think the blue collar jobs of my youth (the ones that paid for the libraries, hospitals, and schools I benefited from) will ever come back, so what will? Will we continue to take out IOUs against our remaining assets as a way to get cheap shit from China and Black Gold from anywhere that still has some?
More and more, I think a collapse of the USA is right around the corner. We are following it in slow-mo/real time. We just don’t have what it takes to suck it up get our shit together. To use the recent vernacular, “is the USA too big to fail?”
No, it is not. Nothing is too big to fail, provided there’s not something bigger to prop the big something up. Who/what will prop us up? I’m dismayed enough by my own country – if I were a resident and citizen in some other part of the world, I’m pretty sure that I’d be unable to find much sympathy for the USA.
I’d like to believe that we, the people of America, can indeed begin from the ground up and restore our country’s integrity, productivity, and value to the global community. In fact, I spend a large portion of my time working to help kickstart that grassroots movement. But I think that it may all be in vain – I think we’re in for something rather unpleasant. To borrow a friend’s phrasing, history is a big wheel with colors painted on the edge – as it rolls along, sooner or later a color will repeat itself. The fall of Rome, the fall of our country, they’re not so different.
Unfortunately, Joey, I think the bigshots are ignoring us.
Case in point. If anyone can read, they know that we have an unsustainable energy and health care economy and a balance of trade deficit driven in part by energy costs. Yet most folks I talk to still greet me with “you still riding your bike to work?”
Its sad. Until recently, the Cannonball I ride on weekends was made in USA. The Salsa was at least designed here. The tandem is made in Oregon. Why the fuck can’t we at least be able to build bicycles?
But even if some of the damn things are built elsewhere, which is harder than ever to avoid, the energy cost is presently paid via beans from New Mexico and rice from California or India rather than oil from Saudi Arabia. Along with my doctors constantly being amazed by my low pulse, BMI, and blood pressure (at my age, my rest pulse sets off the automated alarms), one would think the public would “get it” and get off its collective ass for the good of self and planet. Nope. Fill ‘er up at the pump.
Actually, Joey, its not at all in vain. And thanks for the Michael Pollan article on your web site. I’ve followed his food articles in the NY Times.
http://www.wheelsofchange.net/content/whybother.htm
“…Sometimes you have to act as if acting will make a difference, even when you can’t prove that it will. That, after all, was precisely what happened in Communist Czechoslovakia and Poland, when a handful of individuals like Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik resolved that they would simply conduct their lives “as if” they lived in a free society. That improbable bet created a tiny space of liberty that, in time, expanded to take in, and then help take down, the whole of the Eastern bloc…”
The audacity to think that things can change leads to change.
Speaking of the homeless and good ol’ Grand Junction, a grass-roots organization here has been attempting to do what the city should be at least helping to do, namely provide some sort of shelter for the homeless around here during the winter. Instead, the city seems determined to place obstacles in their way. You’d think the city would appreciate the effort, but instead local government doesn’t get involved until there’s a frozen body to pick up.
This is the same city whose city council insists on having a group prayer before each council meeting. Some christians these folks are (actually, being hypocrites, they’re quite typical).
You can read about it here, if you’re into more sad news: http://www.gjfreepress.com/article/20091127/COMMUNITY_NEWS/911259972/1001&parentprofile=1059
Thanks Khal. Indeed, Pollan articulates quite well why I do “bother”. Keep those wheels rolling!
The Roman Empire didn’t collapse all at once, it took quite a few years to fall. The US Empire won’t collapse much faster to my thinking. As to whether the US can go back to making stuff, that’s a very interesting question. Anyone read Shopclass as Soulcraft? The author makes interesting points about how the idea of working beyond what it took to take care of today’s needs was made popular and how the first craftsmen to work at Ford wanted to quit rather than work the horrible assembly lines. I think the US is a prime example of what is wrong with barely-regulated capitalism. It’s not looking like the Obama folks are going to be doing much in the way of regulations to make things more fair any time soon. Sadly there’s a lot of stuff that Americans could do with their ingenuity, etc. but powerful special interests own way too much of our so-called democracy to allow much deviation from their comfortable status quo….just look at healthcare reform!
“Shop Class as Soulcraft” is indeed a wonderful book. My life made more sense once I read it.
Unemployment at 7.5%!! Wow, all us Left Coasters will be moving there soon. When do the temps warm up so I won’t freeze my ares off?
Seriously, homelessness and unemployment are like comparing oranges and tangerines. Yes there are ‘connections’ but they are not mutually exclusive. Especially at the robust 7.5% quoted above. However, will the number of “gainfully employable homeless” increase? Yep, they probably will. Will it ever be zero? Nope. As long as there are systems in place to help the unwilling there will be people who milk the system. That goes for the poor as well as the rich. Look around you and think how honest, law abiding and “Straight and narrow” your neighbors are.
I can’t say that the neighbor I have who mooches wireless internet access is going to help the economy out because he has a job. He might work a hard day’s work, six days a week without health care, a retirement plan or dental coverage, but his decision to not pay for his access to the net (or not pay off his parking ticket) has no bearing upon his ability to hold a job. In fact, it might actually be the other way around. By choosing to spend his hard earned cash on booze, cigs and 4:20 as frequently as possible, he is driving himself towards the homesless camp.
The essence of the economic climate in America currently is that everyone wants something for nothing! We want universal health care but the thought that we may be taxed for this option is shouted down. We might want to save the environment by riding our bikes to work in the winter, but the amount of whining about the cold, rain, ice and snow could power a small city for a year. Really, we have gotten soft and accepting of the fact that we can have anything we want by being ourselves: lazy ol’ bastards too worried in our own self-interest to see the big picture.