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.
