What’s the first thing on your mind when you wake up in the morning? Getting your kids ready for school? The big project you’ve been slaving over that is in its final stages? How you are going to ask for a raise to pay for Johnny’s braces? How you are going to pick up your dry cleaning, make it to the grocery store, attend that PTA meeting, prepare a meal for the family and still have time to talk to your spouse about something important, revolving it all around your work schedule of course?
These are indeed times of frantic multi-tasking and it can leave you exhausted, but if that sounds anything like a typical day to you, count yourself blessed, your world is moving forward.
Every day there are millions of Americans facing a very different wake up call, and keep in mind that what I am about to tell you is far from the mind boggling trauma of the worst case scenarios, it is simply an example of what it means to be one of the invisible unemployed.
Life used to be good. A steady paycheck was always coming in and you could stand tall against fate because the power over your future was largely in your own hands. You could actually make plans like getting that new car, or taking a family vacation, or hosting a dinner party for your friends. You knew just how many weeks it was going to take to get that flat screen TV, or new bedroom for the kiddies. You could make an occasional impulse buy, or splurge on a night out at a family restaurant. You could sock away a little money for retirement and you could fulfill your dream of owning your own home. Catching yourself humming a tune while you were working on your hobby or even singing in the shower were not out of the ordinary. You could smile. But for some, that world implodes.
You get to work one day and say good morning to your co-workers, like you have a thousand times. There is usually a smile and quick exchange about something or other as you head to your desk, but this morning just feels different. Mary is looking at you like she is going to cry and Steve avoids eye contact as he shuffles past. Something’s up but you can’t put your finger on it, so you just make your way to your little home-away-from-home and get ready to take on the tasks of the day. That’s when your extension rings. It’s your boss, "Could you come to my office for a minute?, we need to talk." His tone was placid and you just know that it is some kind of bad news. Your stomach starts to tickle. You walk in, close the door and take a seat. The next few moments are a gut-wrenching experience that leaves you pale like a sheet with a seemingly unfocused stare, but it’s a stare that is actually focused squarely on the unknown. Your company lost one of its biggest contracts to an overseas competitor and they are left with no choice but to cut back. As swiftly as that, the executioner’s axe has fallen.
You don’t remember the drive home, you don’t know how you negotiated all the lights and traffic because you can’t recall seeing any. It was just one long "What am I going to do?" As you hit the driveway and turn off the car you find yourself not getting out. How are you going to tell your spouse, your kids? How are you going to find work? How are you going to survive? How long is that money in the bank going to keep us afloat? The stream of hows is endless.
Your wife had quit work a few years ago to stay home with the kids and take care of an ailing mother, she also had some medical concerns of her own, so it all made sense. You had made enough to afford that luxury and it felt good inside to be able to do the right thing. It was the traditional family setting that you had grown accustomed to in your own childhood, not everyone’s cup of tea of course, but it worked for you. Everything and everyone was taken care of. You were a provider.
As you sat at the dinner table unloading the day’s news to those you love, you found yourself choking up. You felt inadequate now, you felt like a failure. Even through all of the loving encouragement your family heaped on you after sensing your distress, you can’t shake that feeling. You tell them not to worry. You tell them everything is going to be OK. You tell them what you want to hear.
You finally manage to stop the spinning in your head and fall asleep in the early a.m. When you wake up, for one split second everything is normal, but then a shock goes through your body like an electric current and you are wide awake. You realize you had only been asleep for a couple of hours and you turn to find your cherished wife next you, still cloaked in the peacefulness of slumber. You sit silently, watching her, and pray that you won’t let her down. The whole house is quiet. You look out the window and see the paper being delivered, so you make your way to the door while making a mental note that you better cancel the paper for now.
You have one more paycheck still coming and you try to convince yourself that you will be able to secure a future in short order. You go straight to the classifieds, thankfully missing another front page story about unemployment hovering near 10%. It looks like one sales job after another. Telephone work, outside sales, inside sales, no experience necessary – those same jobs that you were circling when you came right out of high school, those jobs that are minimum wage at best, dressed in a fancy ad. But there is nothing about an experienced widget designer. Everything with a decent salary seems to require a degree that you don’t have.
It has now been a week. You have been to the only three interviews you could find. They all wanted new blood, someone younger, someone with a pedigree of higher learning, someone that you could never be no matter how hard you tried. Experience in life and work does not seem to be a valued commodity. Hopelessness is setting in and you can feel the vigor ebbing from your soul like the sands of the hourglass in your mind that is counting down the hours to catastrophe.
Today your last paycheck arrives, along with the next set of monthly bills. You panic and call a family meeting. They had all tightened their belts and stopped doing a lot of the things they used to enjoy to try to help and to save money, but today it doesn’t feel like enough. You find yourself shouting about buying a soda, about how the generic brands of everything are good enough, about things that used to seem so trivial and inconsequential.
Now you’re over a month in. You had already checked your ego at the door and filed for unemployment which has slowed the bleeding, but has come far short of stopping it. As the bills keep coming you see your bank account dwindling. The heater broke last week and needed to be replaced. Where there used to be five digits in your account balance there are now only four, soon to be three. Still no job.
Another month passes and every door you’ve tried has been firmly closed. You haven’t seen any of your friends in weeks. They keep calling to check on you, but you have long quit picking up the phone when you recognize the number out of shame. You skipped your niece’s birthday because you couldn’t afford to get her even a small gift. The disconnection notices have finally started rearing their ugly heads and your account is now so low that you can’t even take the eight dollars left out of an ATM machine, but you’ll use it at the grocery store for another bag of potatoes and some hamburger meat.
Your kids have made new friends at school, more out of necessity than desire. these new friends are part of families that are going through the same thing and are the only ones that don’t belittle and demean them. Their phones have been long confiscated, their game accounts long closed and every little perk that you could afford them in the past is now just a memory. Your wife wants to work again, but you only have one car and her chances are even smaller than yours at this point after having been out of the work force for awhile.
Right about now is when things start going exponentially bad. Your wife’s condition has flared up and you have been uninsured for awhile now. She suffers through it and every painful move she makes is a searing hot dagger thrust into your heart. You are wracked with worry about what will happen if it gets worse, or if one of your children should be stricken by an illness or injury. You had been driving out to an abandoned lot lately, where you used to see the near homeless and worse hopping into trucks. You knew those trucks were the last salvation for the hopeless and now you were among them. They would roll in, honk their horn and pick out able bodies from the tattered crowd to do some random daily labor job for minimum wage or less, but now the clutch that you had been meaning to have checked months ago finally gave out and you can’t even get there anymore.Your phone and Internet have been disconnected and the foreclosure notice has finally arrived along with the note that your power will be turned off next week.
After another near sleepless night you awaken again. How do I look for a job? How do I call to arrange an interview? How will I get there? How do I make myself presentable? How do I print up another resume? How will I move my family out of our home? How can I face them again today? The endless stream of hows just keep coming.
You can read the news about skyrocketing unemployment every day, but unless you are part of their ranks you can’t even begin to imagine that life. I would say the story I told ranks at about a 5 of 10 on the misery of unemployment scale and it is playing out in millions of homes every single day. I implore you to consider the plight of the stricken out there that find themselves caught in the sinister web of joblessness and shame, seeing Murphy’s Law materialize day after day. Because like me, none of us can know when fate will call our number.
The suffering and despair are staggering and that desperation will lead some to do things they could never even fathom in the past. There will be those that give up in the most ultimate way and there will be those that persevere and find a way through it, and there will be many shades in between, but until you are among them they will remain invisible to your eyes. Their shame will drive them to find comfort in that invisibility, but the numbers show that almost 1 in 10 now find themselves afflicted and most won’t have the more comfortable starting point of having at least some money in the bank, most will be sharing the pole position deep in the red because times have been tough for awhile now.
So, if you are one of the fortunate ones with the means and power to help, please do. If you are an employer that is about to drop the axe, please make sure you’ve thought through every possible alternative before you strike that lethal blow, you may find that thinking outside of the box doesn’t only save a soul from despondence, but you may just happen on to a venture that proves ultimately profitable. If you are neither wealthy nor connected, give of yourself and make your voice heard in the halls of power and make them understand the plight of so many that is ravaging the fabric of the American Dream. Unemployment is not a tale of the unwilling, it is a tale of the forgotten and invisible, it is a tale that will need something out of all of us to rewrite.
Aris
Aris-unchained.com