UNEMPLOYMENT in the SPRING

This year the return of Spring

 hurts: it’s too full of  light, too scented

 with jasmine and daphne,

too loud with  ecstatic birds in the morning

mothers and babies, starting over .

 

Spring this year is too warm

and close to the impossibly blue

melting icecaps.

 

It’s marking time, mocking

what we’ve lost, four months now since

November,  and we’re only  older

and closer to another birthday.

 

We should be off

on adventures,  laying on beaches,

taking advantage  of our empty nest’s  freedom.

We should be celebrating,

 close to retirement.

 

How strange and disconcerting

this stopping in our life

 before we’re ready

this stopping of work, when after all,  losing a job is  not as bad

as a life, a marriage,  or the planet.

 

Still,  it’s what I fear most.

 

Haunted by this image

 not just losing  a job,  but not being able to find another,

and never working again.

 

Or  another image: having to keep working

on and on, when I am too old and tired.

 

Either way, as the latest issue of  The Economist puts it

in America which has “one of the lowest social safety nets

in the rich world, " this spring of 2009

leads me back to that job crisis

and its black hole.

The End of the World and Other Short Stories

I.  According to the Mayan calendar the end of the world is 2012.  That is the year that my daughter will be graduating from MIT with a degree in chemical engineering, ready to save the world.  Will she be too late?

II. My English friend who just voted for her first American president wears a crystal bracelet specially made for her by her Wells Fargo Japanese American banker.  The banker personally chose and strung each crystal with special thoughtfulness about its qualities, stating that if it should break than its work has been done. My friend rejoices not only for the line of credit that she was given to keep her visual effect film studio going but also for this personal act of kindness, the relationship with a banker who really took the time to think about her qualities.

III.There is teenager I know in a high school class for severely handicapped students.  He has no hearing and no speech.  He spends his day in a wheelchair, but smiles at everyone he sees. Last week his Spanish-speaking father sat unsmiling through a meeting with the specialists and the teacher who serve him and then with tears in his eyes reported that they will be returning to Mexico next week.    There is nothing more for them here. Father can get no more work as a day laborer.  There is no unemployment check for day laborers, no stimulus package that is aimed to save the immigrant who came seeking a better life for their handicapped children.

IV My husband’s green card holding Iranian ex colleague, one of the hardest working project managers, was laid off last month.   He uses a metaphor when talking about the lay off business.  He calls it an imprecise science, even as in war and precision bombing, there are always unintended losses.  The cost of laying off workers can be high when it comes with severance and then starting over finding some one else who can do the job of the person who just left. He also uses the metaphor of the Gestapo when referring to the layoffs. It goes like this:

When the Nazis came for the communists, I remained silent. I was not a communist.

When they locked up the socialists I remained silent;I was not a socialist.

When they came for the trade unioinists I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews I remained silent; I was not a Jew.

When they came for me, there was no one left to speak up. 

V.I feel sad.  So sad I break my vow and stop writing every day.  I think about the experience of massive global depression. There is sadness everywhere I look.  Isolation everywhere. Being displaced everywhere.  What is left untouched? I cannot write

VI. I watch two plays in one   weekend where the actors are so close I can almost feel them breathing on me.   Sometimes they look right at me.  I feel uncomfortable, as vulnerable as they are. Sometimes I close my eyes. I do not want them to look at me, but they are looking. They know I am there watching them, and I know that I must watch so they can act.  I think about how their  work is a gift because  it makes me feel alive again.

One actor plays Raskolonikov from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment condensed to a 90-minute play about conscience, something that technology seems to have removed from us. Another murder happens at the Fruitvale Bart station while we were at watching the play. Murderers go   unprosecuted all the time in Oakland. So many murderers walk the streets but still watch their backs.  Now  I think about the other criminals: the bankers who gambled  away our futures. How they needed us, all of us denizens of the American middle class, all the citizens of the world economy, to make this possible. Do any of then experience guilt for our losses?  Obama says he will hire more prosecutors to go after them but  can any thing really bring them to repentance for their actions? How easy it is for them to walk away.  Still there is Jon Stewart and the Daily Show. 

Another actor plays Thom Paine on a stage with nothing, about nothing.  Rambling on, losing track of a thought in the middle of a sentence, frightening us even more with the intensity of his emotion.Did Will Eno purposely name this character after Thomas Paine, father of the Age of Reason?

VII. On December 19, 1776 Thomas Paine writes

'Tis surprising to see how rapidly a panic will sometimes run through a country.

Is he talking to us right now?

THESE are the times that try men's souls…. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.

The heart that feels not now is dead; the blood of his children will curse his cowardice, who shrinks back at a time when a little might have saved the whole, and made them happy.

I love the man that can smile in trouble that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection.

If we do not hang together, we shall surely hang separately.

We have it in our power to begin the world over again.

 

no end in site

I'm feeling much less  hopeful today. 

It's so hard to watch J  get to the point of actually getting a job interview, starting to fantasize how great this job would be,  and then get notified that he wasn't what they had in mind for the job.  The reality sets in again, and the exhaustion.  There is nothing firm to get a hold of right now.  No end in site of this process of working with no work.

The Act of Framing

Crisis or opportunity?

It’s all in how you frame it:

recession depression

rich poor end beginning more or less.

 How we describe and diagnose what is happening

has everything to do with what happens

and what is happening is what is happening right now

like a piece of modern music

that would otherwise be impossible to sing.

 

Do you remember how it was when we tried to get our first job?

How we had to pad our resume, make up experiences we never had?

Now they tell us to strip it down so we don’t intimidate

the person who is younger and less experienced

and after all, getting older  only  means we know we don't really  know

Still, on  March 9, 2009, the Chronicle headlines

announce what I’ve been writing about:

Older Job Seekers Face Extra Hurdles in a Tough Market

in the longest recession since the depression

with 12.5 million jobless, where  an education  is no inoculation

and a 62 year old who applied for more than 1000 jobs in 18 months,

finally got one interview, and was told he didn’t fit in

because the bias against older workers is so pervasive.

 But here is another picture:

After no bite on the end of the job search line

for months J who just turned 54 

has all at once many tugs and 4 interviews

and should a job be offered I’m not sure I would want him to accept 

since we’re finally doing what matters most:

 gently using the resources on this fragile earth

spending more time watching the sunset

and feeding each other.

 

And what about this: 

getting a job and being laid off soon after

could be worse than not taking the job offered,

not loosing the unemployment check

and the opportunity to pursue a dream.

When there’s so little certainty about the future

there is so much less to lose, and so much more to gain

when we re-claim our freedom to create our lives.

 Another frame:

There are  long food lines

but the lines are for Pizziola, the  restaurant on Telegraph Ave.

that’s too cool to have a sign

where beautiful young people are sipping cocktails

speaking of their latest love conquests.

 There are people who really don’t think about

being laid off and the money they’ve lost.

Our realtor friend this week closed two deals

both over a million dollars and proclaims:

the recession is officially over!

Teaching our children the why of work and the how to dream

 This week the principal in one of my schools is near tears. He came into a meeting and described what he saw in a classroom. And how it feels like nothing we have done seems to have made any difference.

Despite all the efforts to create a climate of change. Despite the counseling, tutoring, after school programs, parenting programs and commitment of more than 8 hour days put in by all the teachers the 8^th graders are failing. They are throwing pencils at the teacher, caught  up with drugs, ipods, cell phones, sometimes weapons, they are joining gangs and refusing to listen.

 Why? He wants to know.  What have we done wrong?How can we do better at teaching our children what they need to learn?How do we inspire them so that they will want to work?

 This week my oldest friend is visiting from Ohio. We shared the best teacher of our life and forty-four years later this teacher is still the greatest connection we have to each other.We can remember everything about him.And we are not the only ones.At a class reunion several years ago every one of our classmates shared the same experience of this 5^th grade teacher that we had thought was ours alone:That because of him we had felt uniquely talented.

 Mr. Doyle taught us how to think, and to make something real come out of these thoughts.He inspired us all to be writers. 

Before Mr. Doyle learning was a rote thing for us. But in Mr. Doyle’s class we did creative writing every day and turned this writing into  a business.We developed our own system of money, hired publishers, illustrators, and printers. We learned to make contracts with each other and the business grew.

 That was the year that learning and working became my passion.

I think about all of this now,  as the principal is near tears, and as I talk to my friend. How I first learned that my words and action could make a difference. And how, in this  time of recession/ depression, still I feel that passion has never left me.

 Maybe the changed world, or a world that we need to work to change, is still an abstract concept to these kids in our classrooms. Still  we must not forget, many of them are children of immigrants. Fragile economic realities surround them, with the pressures to perform,the demand for rising test scores, the precarious survival of their schools.

 Maybe the changed world is still far removed from our own children, our newly minted college graduates,to whom we provided with every opportunity,and now release into this world of shrinking resources.

We wonder: Do they take any job they can get?Live at home longer?Do we encourage them still to follow their passions? And why are they still hanging out in cafes, going to restaurants? Don’t they know we are in a new world, a world where it’s  no longer about money coming freely, or just for personal gain, no longer about taking anything for granted.

 Now everything comes around to this image under the water fall at the Yerba Buena Center, at the memorial for Martin Luther King,where the  words from the I Have a Dream speech are engraved.

 Because no matter what we do, now it really is up to our children to“face the difficulties of today and tomorrow…the fierce urgency of now.To make real the promises of democracy…"

It is up to our children to confront an America that “has defaulted on a promise…given a bad check, a check that has come back marked insufficient funds.” They are the ones who  must refuse to believe “that the bank of justice is bankrupt …that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity.”

 And finally, as the great orator so prophetically said all those years ago when  my friend and I were fifth grade students: "We must rapidly begin to shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."

 As Mr. Doyle taught, our children now must  learn how to think and to feel and to work again with passion. But above all, they must learn how to be human again,   without I-pods, cell phones  and computers for a moment, just  listening  and talking with each other, finding out that they tare   uniquely gifted human beings. That is when the change will come and we will know  the greatness of our classrooms and our country, and have true hope for  our future.

 

 

 

 

Musings on Marriage: Riding the Waves

Every time I turn on the radio today there is more  really  bad news about the economy. About how the stock market is at its  lowest  level since 1997 after insurer American International Group posted a staggering $61.7 billion in quarterly losses.Abut how even more bailout money is required.About a small town in Ohio, where almost half of the population is unemployed as the main business just  shut down. People are  standing in lines to get donations of food, the very same people who used to be giving to these very same charities.  Many are in a state of stunned disbelief that a job they’d held for 25 years has ended.  People are asking: How can this be happening to us?  Here in America?

YIKES.

Through all this I have been  watching Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke, watching these inconceivable images of the drowning population of New Orleans.Sometimes it feels like what we saw in New Orleans after Katrina was a microcosm of what we are seeing right now,  as we hang on metaphorically to the roof of our houses and  to our loved ones, hold on to edge from which we so easily could slip off into those torrential waters that are  rising and swirling around us.

 And some days the greatest strain in all of this is the pressure it  places  upon my marriage. As March arrives it has been a full three months since J has been without a job.  Job  loss is up there with life’s greatest stresses, the sense of powerlessness and the loss of the sense of identity that work brings. Because  I have vowed to keep writing every day until J finds work again,  I must be truthful about all this.  If I’m not telling it like its happening to us what is the use of writing at all?

I am reminded of an article from  the  NYT (February 5, 2009) “As Layoffs Surge, Women May Pass Men in the Job Force.” Catherine Rampell writes: The proportion of women who are working has changed very little since the recession started. But a full 82 percent of the job losses have befallen men…

So here it is. The statistics that are probably telling many stories that are very similar to mine. I am not in a support group with those working wives, but I suspect there are times that there marriages are getting as battered as ours by this storm of job loss and economic crisis.  Yes. The truth is, we are having some really tough times together.

When it’s bad it seems no matter what I say it is the wrong thing, and some undercurrent of resentment comes through in my voice. Usually it is something along the lines of “ You are not taking good enough care of ME.” with the subtext of (“ because you do not have a job, and I am super stressed about having to keep everything afloat!”)  “You  need to do more around the house.   You need to  home after the class you are taking at night so I can get enough sleep because I am the one who has to get up in the morning and go to work. “

I remember reading that  money  problems  are in fact the number one reason for divorce.  In our worst moments of discord we imagine this possibility although it really is not something either of us would invite to  shatter our economic partnership that really is still primarily based in love.

And most of all, hard as it is for me to believe this, we are also having some of the best times we’ve ever had   (just like I heard from some of the folks in New Orleans). These are the times   when I stop worrying about the loss of income and retirement savings and I actually enjoy our simpler life. The way we are making food, going out less, the way we really connecting with our friends, getting our priorities straight. I like that he is there in the morning when I leave for work, that he isn’t as tired from commuting. That he’s getting to take walks with me at the end of the day. That he can really learn new things, and explore his own projects.

So today, driving home from work listening to the bad news, thinking about the stresses of our weekend, I suddenly am flooded with a sense of acceptance of the way things are, that maybe it’s going to be like this for the very long tim . And maybe this is just the  impetus I need for myself, so that I will  write every day, something that I've always said I wanted to do.

But then, when I get home J tells me the news on his front. It’s not bad news.  Rather, it seems he has not just one but two job prospects.  No face-to-face interviews yet but real interest in him and his skills.  A good match.  Maybe a job.  Just when I was accepting the way things are, more change may be ahead. And more waves.