By David Magallanes / Guest contributor
No one wants to look at it. After all, maybe it will just go away. We avoid even mentioning it, lest we give it power, lest it be true. If we do discuss it, it’s in hushed tones, not for public consumption.
We’re talking here about the ghost of employment past, when we all had cars and homes and kids who went to college if they so chose. After all, in California, higher education was available to all and practically free — or at least, manageable. Anyone who wanted a job, and was sufficiently responsible to hold one, worked. Our homes were increasing in value, and we could count on what seemed like eternal prosperity, or at the very least, comfortable living.
But then, as we know all too well now, the bubble burst in 2008 as violently as the Big Bang must have shaken the very foundations of heaven and hell.
By now we’ve traversed four years of this Apocalypse, and most of us are quite scathed, if not shattered. Our investments tanked, our jobs sometimes deflated, if not evaporated. Our children, who may not be old enough to have experienced the relative prosperity to which we boomers felt entitled, suddenly found life challenging, with formidable walls rising up before them, no matter to which direction they turned.
But those of us raised in the boom times took heart in the apparent fact that things would “get better again,” as they always had. After all, this is America, the Land of Milk and Honey, God’s country.
Or is it?
The U.S. will always hold a special place in the world. This nation is founded on principles that citizens of other lands can only dream of experiencing in their lifetimes. We are, and will continue to be, a Promised Land.
However — and here’s the hard part — we may well be due for some “attitude adjustment” regarding our lifestyle. It’s starting to leak out in articles I see in the newspaper (I still read a paper newspaper in my hands every morning) and on the Internet news services. The specter of chronic unemployment is becoming hard to ignore any longer. We may have to face the fact, head-on, that we don’t live in quite the same country anymore. The work ethic and sheer brawn that brought us over the past century to this precipice in 2008 may no longer function in this new day dawning after the nightmare.
Too many people are sliding into long-term unemployment, which might devolve into something permanent. There are forces at work that spell trouble and deliver double- and triple-whammies: during this recession, technology has become more sophisticated, allowing for efficiencies not even imagined at the beginning of this new century just several years ago; people who are unemployed for long lose what skills they had, besides the fact that those skills are becoming less and less relevant as the earth shifts beneath them; companies have realized, to their delight and that of stockholders, that they didn’t need that many people after all. Never mind that those who are left, in some cases, are burning out.
In the editorial “Unemployment problem won’t have an easy fix,” dated April 2, 2012, in the Ventura County Star, we read the shocking realization of where we have arrived: “…some American adults may never again enjoy meaningful employment, with very little in the way of a social safety net for able-bodied adults.”
Also, “Many labor analysts, as Mr. (Bartholomew) Sullivan (a Scripps Howard News Service reporter) finds, believe the U.S. is entering a period of structural unemployment.”
In other words, we better get used to it. And plan accordingly. This is not going to be easy, folks.
For the past several years, state and federal governments have been extending and re-extending unemployment benefits, but this, like all good things, cannot last. The piper is at our door, waiting to be paid. And he wants a tip.
In a Reuters international news agency article on MSN.com titled, High unemployment may dog the U.S. for years, authors Jonathan Spicer and Lucia Mutikani write about older unemployed American workers who feel they are running out of options and warn that “Their plight also poses a warning that U.S. unemployment may not drop back to its pre-recession levels and could be stuck higher than many policymakers expect.”
May not drop back to pre-recession levels? Does that mean what we think it means? Does it mean…we’re becoming the new Europe?
As a matter of fact, the VC star editorial indeed hits the nail on the head as it concludes with these words that would be funny if they weren’t true: “We may indeed be looking a lot more like Europe, but not in the way anybody wants.”
And certain politicians are talking about shredding the safety net — or what’s left of it.
We’re entering a new age. This may become survival of the fittest. And by the “fittest,” I mean those who are willing to go out into the physical world and network, develop new skills, educate themselves, create a working lifestyle that generates enough income to thrive, or at least stay afloat. Old ways of thinking about work no longer work. We can’t afford to sit around and lament that “no one offers us work.” They’re not going to anymore. Launching résumé after résumé into cyberspace to people we don’t know and can’t even see and hoping they notice us is futile. The responsibility is on us — not them — to find a need and service it. Hoping that someone gives us work now is like hoping to win the lottery. The odds are against us, especially if we’re older or inexperienced or disabled or lack skills and/or education. Or if we don’t know how to interview, which is actually a common problem.
Reality check: no one owes us work. We are the captain of our ship, and it’s entirely up to us to discover the talents that lie within the cavernous hold of this ship and offer them to a world that’s anxious to bestow rewards on those who have something to offer from their deepest reservoirs.
— David Magallanes is a speaker, writer and an emeritus professor of mathematics at a California community college. He may be contacted at adelantos@msn.com