Today, so many people I know are worried about their jobs. More and more I'm meeting people who don't have a job and can't get one. Just today I learned that a friend has been locked out of his work, while his wife can't find a steady job. With the for-profit health care situation in the US, they have had to CANCEL DOCTORS' APPOINTMENTS FOR THEIR TWO CHILDREN. The husband's employers, ConEdison, froze their health benefits when they locked them out. This is barbaric.
I was moved and grateful to read the following sentences about unemployment, from the current issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, and I think every person who's unemployed should be able to read them. Moreover, every person who's fortunate enough to have a job in these days of economic cruelty should read it in order to get a sense of what it's like to be unable to find work:
Chairman of Education Ellen Reiss writes:
"Among the effects of unemployment . . . is hunger, including the hunger of children across the land who cannot get the food their little stomachs need because their jobless parents are unable to purchase it. And there is this effect: every person who wants a job and cannot get one, feels a certain way. When a person sends off a resume* and gets no response or is turned down; or goes for a job interview, then learns he has been passed over; or, after working someplace for years, is told his services are no longer needed—there is tremendous feeling. Millions of people are being made to feel that they cannot be of use, that America does not need what they can do. That feeling is horrible. And it comes from a lie."
People in England should know that, though it's true that the US has been the bastion of capitalism for many years (though that is changing) there is also great and increasing feeling against this brutal way of seeing and using people. To learn more about how Aesthetic Realism sees economics, go to this article called "Reality vs. the Profit Motive."
*CV
