Regardless of what happens in Congress, regardless of the long-term deficit issues, regardless even of the potential political victory for the Republicans, I continue to support the general structure of President Obama's proposed deal, because it provided for 13 more months of unemployment payments for 2 million Americans and their families. To those of you don't see that as reason enough, I remind you of the Native American proverb, "Never criticize a man until you've walked a mile in his moccasins." Allow me to lend you mine.
In 2002, I was a Brandeis University and Yale Law School graduate who had been practicing law for close to a decade, had published a non-fiction book, and had built a solid reputation in Internet business law. I had (and still have) a wife, three kids, a modest house in Queens, NY and two cars (a Ford Taurus and Windstar minivan, which we also still have). I also had no job.
You see, Internet business law (not the IPO insanity, but day-to-day contracts and advising) requires that there be Internet-based companies doing business, and by 2002, there were very few; the bubble had well and truly burst. I had been general counsel of one, an online retailer that had entered bankruptcy protection and ceased operations in 2001, and by early 2002 I was finally laid off after having been on partial salary for a few months as we wound down the company. The layoff came as no surprise, of course, and I had been jobhunting for awhile, but there was nothing out there. I don't mean there was nothing I liked, or in my field: there were no jobs for lawyers with my level of experience and rather varied background. I tried for the few, more junior positions offered by law firms, but those employers felt I was "overqualified" (meaning too senior to be bossed around effectively) and wouldn't interview me. Of course, I applied for and received unemployment payments, but the amount was both much lower than even my reduced salary and was actually taxable, and at a number of points that year, I too needed a statutory extension of my expiring benefits.
My wife, meanwhile, had no good way of earning an income. She had given up her own professional path (a PhD program in clinical psychology) when our first child was born in late 1994, developed cancer as an infant, went through 18 months of successful chemotherapy, and then was diagnosed with high-functioning autism. Taking care of him, and his two younger siblings (our youngest, a daughter, had been born in late 2001), was a full-time + job, and any way, my credentials meant I had a better shot at getting a decent job than did she. So I tried. And tried, and tried.
For 12 months we did anything we could to get by without destroying our children's futures. Thank God, we had family and friends who helped us (including an anonymous individual who dropped a money order for $1,000 into our mailbox one day), but none of them was wealthy either, so the help was as modest as it was appreciated. We extended our debts, cut expenses wherever possible, and found any income we could. (I tried to start a computer setup and help business, putting up flyers in my neighborhood, and spent two days that summer temping as a paralegal for a solo practitioner in Manhattan; I never mentioned that I was a lawyer with a decade of experience, because I wouldn't have gotten the gig. I was a damned good typist, though.)
Unemployment wasn't the only outside help we sought, of course. Thankfully, New York State had a health plan for low-income families, so our children maintained their medical care. I applied for food stamps, but even though we had essentially $0 income, our remaining assets (the second leased car, a few thousand dollars in a 401K account from a previous job) made us ineligible. We applied for an interest-free loan from a community organization, and my law school thankfully had a loan forgiveness program that temporarily removed that burden from us, but it was still not enough. We were approaching the point where we would have to make long-term financial decisions (like try to sell our home) that would take years to undo.
While we certainly did not live a lavish lifestyle, we did have some fairly sizable expenses. Even food was a challenge; our family keeps kosher, and both of our sons are gluten-intolerant besides, making even the basics much more expensive. We were fortunate (so to speak) that our community had a local kosher food organization, Tomchei Shabbos of Queens (absolutely worthy of your contributions), from which we received weekly gifts of meat, chicken and leftover Passover food (which was made without wheat).
As wonderful as my wife was (and is), and as supportive as our community and families were, the year took an unbelievable emotional toll on me and on us. Even as we desperately tried to keep our children from understanding how dire things were getting, we lived with the constant fear of losing our home or even just facing another major medical or other crisis that would wipe out anything we still had. The stress and fear caused me, at a particularly vulnerable and hopeless point, to hire an incredibly overpriced career counseling firm with money we didn't have to spend, in the hopes that it could repackage my business and technology experience to find a position beyond law. That completely wasted effort, and the money it took, became probably the single biggest conflict of our marriage, far beyond even the stress of dealing with an infant with cancer.
The lowest point, though, was probably the night when the fundraising committee from our children's day school came to our home late one evening. They knew very well what our situation was; in fact, they had turned us down for financial aid that year, offering instead to lend us the tuition, which would have just dug our hole deeper. (A family member ultimately helped us cover the cost that year.) The committee came anyway, because it had a mandate to speak to every family from the school about donating to the building project. We sat around our kitchen table listening to the committee chair gave his proposed pitch, even while he could barely meet our eyes as he did. We let him finish, politely declined to donate, reminding them of our complete lack of income, and bid them a good evening. It was, in its own way, more devastating a reminder of our plight than even picking up the donated food each week.
With a great deal of luck, and perhaps some divine assistance (I wouldn't presume to deserve such, but it feels that way to me), I finally got a wonderful position which I still have teaching in my area of law. It was as if our lives had restarted again and, within a few years, we had paid back the loans that we had received from our friends and family members and even begun building up a tiny financial cushion for the future.
That's my story: a year of unemployment with an Ivy League law degree. I certainly wouldn't compare my experience to those who don't have friends and family members who can help, who can't get health insurance, who do lose their homes and everything else, whose marriages are destroyed by the stress. I can, though, tell you that all of us who have been and who now are long-term unemployed are grateful for the compassion demonstrated by President Obama's proposal and his statements yesterday. For the rest of the politicians, pundits and Kossacks who minimize the importance of the 13-month extension of benefits, or who feel it was worth risking the extension at all, my moccasins, and a mile of rocky roads, await.