Keep Showing Up?

A couple of days ago, getting my morning tea at the local WaWa, I found myself waiting in line and skimming the headlines of the local Philadelphia newspaper next to a well-dressed man in his late fifties. I was buying the paper and he was reading over my shoulder. It was one of those adult "share with your neighbor" moments that are, thank God, frequently common in this part of the country. People in the Philadelphia and Southern New Jersey area are friendly. Gruff, but friendly.

So this gentleman and I were crammed together in a line that snaked around the counter top in a sea of humanity, most dressed in clothes speckled in paint or in nurse's scrubs, and we started up a conversation over the headlines in the newspaper, most of them covering the spiraling unemployment rate in this country.

"It's ugly out there but the worst part of this whole blasted mess is the human toll," he observed.

Curious, I asked him what he meant.

"You know, relationships busted up under this kind of strain, marriages falling apart, kids getting abused more...that kind of stuff," he said.

"And me," he continued, "I am one of those guys," and he pointed to a headline saying that workers over 50 years of age were at very high risk for never finding employment opportunities again.

"What did you do, um, before this?" I asked.

"Lawyer," he told me, "But one of the good ones, not the ambulance chasers. I worked in Trenton doing environmental protection law. They downsized all of those 'wasteful' programs, like protecting our state's environment and resources, and then I was out of a job. Just like that, after almost 30 years."

We paid for our teas, coffees, and newspapers and continued our conversation in the parking lot.

I was intrigued by this man not only because he seemed very open and friendly, but also because he was dressed as if he still DID have a job.

I pointed this out to him and he laughed.

"Yeah, I still put the suit on. I don't know why but I think it has to do with the fact that if I keep showing up everyday dressed for the job, well, maybe I will eventually get a job!"

I laughed, noticing that I was NOT dressing as if I was ready for the job, in my yoga pants and t-shirt.

"Plus," he continued, "it's my wife too. It's for her. We had to give up the house in Trenton and the place we had with my kids up in Philly. We are still able to afford our shore(beach) house because I managed to pay the place off when...well, when I had a job...so now we live down here. But it's killing her slowly so I think it is important that I put on a suit everyday like it is still the same. It's important to her even if it just...well, just an imaginary thing for now."

I felt tears start to come but I willed them back. I was not going to get all weepy around this guy who, for whatever reason, had decided to grace my life with some dignity that day.

"But you're in such a good mood, it seems," I said to him. "How do you remain in such good spirits?"

"Well, I ain't dead!" he joked, "And I still have a home and my kids are helping us out now so we're not poor...and what's the point of being miserable? If they ever decide to hire an environmental protection lawyer again, they are not going to hire the miserable guy."

I envied him his goodwill and bid him farewell and good luck. Before he asked me about my story.

On the way home I was processing what he said about the human toll of being unemployed and I was suddenly transported back to graduate school nine years earlier.

I was a student of international relations and had harbored a lifelong curiosity about war. No, not just the munitions and the battlefield, but the actual human effects of war.

I had an incredible professor at the time and she was dedicated to helping her students and everyone else she encountered understand that while war was indeed devastating, the worst part came in its aftermath.

Not just in the broken and bruised bodies, or the mass graves, or the leftover landmines, or the post-traumatic stress disorder....the worst part boiled down to one thing: unemployment.

Wars devastate national economies in their aftermath. Yes, while some wars indeed provide hyper-inflated economic growth during the time of planning and the active military campaign, almost all come to a crashing close with a shut-down economy and hundreds of thousands of people unemployed.

And that, my professor used to say, was when the shit hit the fan.

We were studying Kosovo and some small wars in Africa at the time and I remember reading articles, testimonies, books, etc., about the spike in divorces, suicides, spousal and child abuse, and stress-induced mental disorders. Alongside those statistics were spikes in alcoholism, drug use, and other substance-related abuse.

"A human being not being allowed to exhibit his or her potential is one of the most destructive forces on the planet," this professor used to say.

Years later, in Washington DC, I remembered her words when I worked on various task forces planning for post-war Iraq. I also remembered it when I was asked to do assessments of why various initiatives in post-conflict countries were not working. Why, with all the money being poured in to prop economies up, were they still on the verge of war all the time?

This is just a blog and not one intended to go into the shortcomings of international development assistance and pre-and post-war planning but something struck me that day in the WaWa parking lot talking to the unemployed lawyer in the suit that hadn't occurred to me with such clarity before:

This was us. This was me. This was the United States in 2010.

I started to count back in my head the number of couples that I knew, really good couples, that had either broken up or gotten divorced over the past year.

I thought about the phone calls from formerly upbeat male and female friends who would call with a litany of things that were suddenly driving them nuts about their significant others, their kids, their parents, etc.

And I realized that all of them, ALL OF THEM, had one thing in common: someone had recently become unemployed.

And not one of them, not one, had ever been unemployed in their adult lives. These folks are all go-getters, over-achievers, and highly skilled. They are doctors, lawyers, psychiatrists, graphic artists, musicians, former military officers, etc.

If life were a baseball game, these are the people you would definitely want in your starting line-up. Creative, impassioned, driven, and intelligent (both the school and street-smarts variety), these friends of mine are now unemployed. Most with a spouse or a significant other, many with kids, and all sharing one particular problem: their relationships are falling apart.

Sticking to spouse/significant other relationships for the moment, the theme is something like this: "He or she knew me as a certain person and now I am not that person any longer. I am still the same person inside but how can he or she know that because no one else seems to see that anymore. It's not just the money, it's the fact that I can't share in the experience anymore. I cannot be part of the experience because I have no money. I can't give or receive. And so we fight because I am angry but there is no one to be angry with. How can I feel angry when everyone else is telling me that this is happening to EVERYONE? But I am not everyone, I am me and I am angry. How can this be happening to ME?"

Something like that.

I am, of course, in that category as well. This is why I think I can articulate it clearly. I am also one of those friends of mine who sneak out onto the porch or the balcony or into the backyard with a beer or a glass of wine, and participate and initiate the phone calls. I am also one of the people whose own relationship is suffering. I am also one of those people who is angry all the time but feels guilty about feeling that way.

The cruelest part are the people who say, "You're just being picky, just go get any job."

I wish.

My friend Kelly, a graphic artist who used to work with autistic children, told me about her recent experience:

"Tom and I have been fighting non-stop and it's because of money. I used to make about $70,000 a year and now that whole income is gone and we are surviving on his $30,000 a year job as a glass blower. I have been searching for two years and nothing even remotely close to my field has come up. So I decided to go apply at the diner down the road because they were hiring and I needed to do something, anything, to make money and be active again. I went in and filled out an application where I had to list my education and prior work experience. You know what the manager did? He threw the thing back in my face and said, 'We got people who need work a lot more than you with your fancy education, go try somewhere else.'"

Same with my friend, John, a former Marine Corps engineer who left the military to work for a private contractor for a few years. When they downsized, he was out of a job and spent two years looking for something, anything, that might put his talents to use. He called two weeks ago to tell me that he and his wife were getting divorced.

"It was just too much strain. She knew me when I was bringing in about $180,000 a year and could afford to take us on all of these expensive trips. I was the asshole at the time and told her to stop working so hard as a teacher. So she lost all of her accreditation and now she has had to go back to work making less than she did when we got married. Now she works in a crappy school district making $27,000 a year and I have no job. She can get more benefits from the state with the kids if she divorces me. I can't blame her but I just never thought my life would turn out like this...I was given a full scholarship to Duke, for Christ's sake! Now I work at a drug store and make $8.00 an hour and she is too embarrassed to have me as her husband...but it's my fault."

The last significant story is about my friend's ex-girlfriend. Her name is Lydia and she was, for years, one of the most sought-after linguists in Washington, DC. Half Lebanese, half German, she grew up on military bases around the world after her father became a U.S. naturalized citizen following his service in Vietnam. She had a natural talent for languages and found gainful employment for years teaching rich kids in DC how to speak French while working part-time at a charter school giving lessons. When the war in Iraq happened, Lydia volunteered because she was fluent in Arabic. In 2008, several civilian tours later, and with her beloved boyfriend and my friend, Kevin, an Army NCO, on her arm, she returned to Washington, DC.

Kevin tells it like this:

"She was convinced she would find work again but no one was hiring. The economy had been hit hard and private language lessons were one luxury that quickly got cut from rich people's budgets. None of the charter schools were hiring and neither were the public schools. She would try to get jobs that matched what she could do, even stuff like teaching immigrants English, and she would be turned down once they saw her resume. They just assumed she wanted the same amount of money again even though she didn't. She just wanted to fucking work! So she tried and kept getting more and more angry and more and more distant. The worst time was when she was working at 7-11 and a bunch of kids came in and called her a 'dot-head' and pushed her around. I tried to do everything I could but supporting two people on my salary was getting tough. We started fighting all the time because we were both drinking too much and I couldn't find work either. It just all went to hell. I sometimes wonder how it would have been if she could have found work or I could have gotten a better job. But there's no use thinking those thoughts anymore, what's gone is gone."

This blog is not meant to be a formerly-rich or upper-middle class person's manifesto of collective distress.

But it IS reality.

Relationships at every level are being torn apart as people are cast adrift in a society that has become closed and is shedding its pool of talent. My own included.

Chas has insisted to me that things will get better and I love him all the more for his assurances. But I also know that I have had the same thing happen to me that my friends have had happen to them: my resume or job application turned back in my face and some wise ass who doesn't know me in the least say, "Oh, I am supposed to hire you? With your fancy Master's degree and all this time spent in foreign countries? I am supposed to feel sorry for you? Well, go knock on someone else's door, we hire people who really want to work."

Or applying for jobs that ARE in my field only to get: "Look, we'd love to hire you but there is no way we can pay you that salary again...I know you say that you are willing to take less but it's better for us to hire someone with fewer expectations and far less experience, we hope you understand."

What? Fewer expectations and less experience? Is this really what our country is about?

So we creep home with the news that, once again, we failed to get hired.

And our spouses or significant others try to be understanding but still ask, "How is that possible? How can you not get a job?"

They don't mean it, but the words slip out and, like a surgeon's knife, lob off another part of our identity and another piece of our soul.

Chas asks me sometimes why I stay up so late at night, why I don't come to bed with him.

He thinks it is because I am rejecting him or that I don't love him.

The reality is that the new job posts for people who work in foreign relations come up on a website at midnight and I keep watch over it like a mother would with a sick child.

Resume or CV at the ready, I write relevant cover letters, piece together writings that seem to fit, run through my list of references to find the ones that are most appropriate, and then fire off the application into the ether with a prayer.

Then I check my chat box on gmail and see about five or six of my friends online at the same time, doing the very same thing. We inevitably start chatting and then I crawl into bed at 2am exhausted but better for my late night chats with people who are experiencing the same thing.

We normally convene again the next day, sometime past 10pm, to talk about how another fight has happened, another marriage has come closer to breaking, another person is more distant and less forgiving. We send each other articles and postings of relevance and try to keep each other sane.

But no one is sane.

I shared the story of the man at WaWa the other night on one of our chats.

"That IS a good story. Inspiring," Kevin chatted.

"Maybe we just keep showing up?" another friend said.

So, yeah, I guess we just keep showing up and hope, pray, that those around us know that we all have far greater abilities and potential than what is currently on the surface.