Boy, there sure isn’t a lot of ink about the more than 800,000 people whose unemployment checks will go poof next week because the Senate hasn’t got the stones to extend their benefits. At least Marie Antoinette is said to have mentioned something about cake.
You will recall what happened to her. This lesson is clearly lost on our current aristocracy.
I wonder how many of these empty suits has been laid off, stuck between gigs for more than 26 weeks, watching their savings shrink like a spider on a hotplate. I got laid off once, back in the Eighties, and those unemployment checks — plus the patience and generosity of friends and family — kept me from robbing liquor stores. (Hey, I already owned a gun and kept it loaded. Still do, and it still is.)
Finding another newspaper job was not easy. My résumé looked like a bus schedule, and it documented a few questionable career decisions that always make a managing editor go, “Mmm, hmm, one of those guys.” I came this close to getting a copy-desk job at the Ventura Star-Free Press, where a friend was already on staff, but you know what they say about close.
Finally, just as my unemployment was about to run out, I got lucky at The New Mexican. Some 24 weeks after being shown the door at a weekly chain in Denver, I was a taxpayer again, at a daily in Santa Fe. Definitely a trade up, for a while. I liked it so much I made it my last newspaper job.
Now, I won’t say that I didn’t enjoy some of my enforced vacation. I rode my bike a ton, and I didn’t have to write columns, draw cartoons, edit copy and photos for three papers, lay out pages and oversee (and sometimes take part in) the papers’ pasteup. And I never had to look at that fat-ass publisher again, though I would meet others.
But I was a 30-something single man with a dog, a paid-off pickup and few other encumbrances. No kids complaining about soup-kitchen Thanksgivings and toyless Christmases; no exasperated wife hunting loopholes in the marriage vows; no lenders repo’ing house, car and home-theater system (though I did get sideways with American Express over a late payment involving the purchase of proper job-hunting clothing).
Dude like that can couch-surf for quite a while unless he’s an outlandish asshole. Which I was, and am, but like I said, my people were patient and generous.
Somehow I think there are a few families among those 800,000 who will lose their benefits next week, and among the 1.2 million who will join them by the end of December. And these miserable pricks in DeeCee couldn’t give a rat’s ass about any of them, you, or me.
Hope? Yeah, right. Hope in one hand, shit in the other, and see which one fills up faster.
Mad Blog Media 
Yep the Pentagon gets everything they want and the tax payers eat Sh*t. Same old, same old. People don’t matter any more.
At least it used to be popular to say you were on the side of working Americans. Now even that isn’t true. In fact just the opposite. “Quit picking on those benighted rich folks” if you listen to Rand Paul and his ilk.
Even tho our family is doing relatively well there will be no Xmas gifts. Instead we will be at soup kitchens, food pantries and buying gifts for folks on the local giving tree. I guess we really have reached Bush Lite’s dream of faith-based public service. Wish I could do it all with a dose of real faith.
March on Washington! Granted the weather may be a bit dodgy, but what else are they going to do? Maybe roll a few hundred 55-gallon drums up Pennsylvania Ave. and start some fires? Roll a few fat cats out of their offices and BBQ? I hear pork goes well over an open flame this time of year. Just a thought….
Patrick, I knew I could count on you for some words of cheer this holiday season.
The folks are getting a preview of what the soon-to-be Repuglican dominated congress will be like. Will they get riled up enough by Rush Windbag, Lipstick and Dipstick to toss ’em out in 2012? We can hope!
I tried the unemployment gig once, but gave up after answering “all of ’em” to the question at the unemployment office, “which of those jobs are you qualified to do?” only to be sent off on interviews where they said, “We’d hire you right now but we know you’d work here only until a better job came around, so instead we’ll hire someone who is barely qualified. That way we know they’ll stay.” Luckily I had enough savings, severance pay, vacation pay and credit cards to spend the summer riding bicycles and motorcycles and deciding I’d try to avoid any real job in the future — only working at stuff I’d pretty much do for free while being lucky to get a paycheck. Motorcycle and bicycle shop jobs were the deal until the wife came along — then it was back to “real” jobs to put her through grad school…but now I get to do what I love again…and in good years we actually make money at CycleItalia! We’ll share the wealth with the local food bank along with the other charities we support. It’s never enough but we try.
I, and hopefully millions of others, are about to get really really pissed! What can we do though, still outnumbered and outvoted by the dumbasses!
Until Americans figure out that Republicans only care about the rich and that Democrats only excel in turning victories into defeat, we will be in the mess we are in.
I’m waiting for the other shoe to fall–that Obama will cave on the tax bailout to the rich because the Repugs in the Senate will bring government to a stop and the Dems don’t have the balls to change the Senate rules like the Repugs once threatened.
Meanwhile, no one will take the advice of the Gang of 18 ( I still have some respect for guys like Alan Simpson and Pete Dominici) and in a couple years, the Chinese will stop lending us money. When that happens, old Uncle Sam is going to react like a junkie suddenly denied his fix. What does a national case of cold turkey look like?
So you better have your vegetable garden planted and the shootin’ iron oiled up to kill the occasional dinner. Or the crazed lunatic breaking into your house. What really worries me is when the final debt straw breaks old Uncle Sam’s back, there will be a lot of scapegoating to be done as the ship ‘o state sinks and sinks fast.
And now, for my pessimistic speech….