|
Article Excerpt
Sometime last summer I began to notice that my friend Jost Lunstroth had developed a verbal tic. He would suggest a time to meet for lunch and then punctuate the invitation with "Does that make sense?" Or he'd suggest an alternate route for walking our dogs around the neighborhood and ask the same question: "Does that make sense?" He would try to simplify the technical aspects of some job he had held in the past, and there it would be, springing from his lips afresh: "Does that make sense?" The question, I finally realized, was an outer manifestation of Jost's inner turmoil. A technology consultant, he'd lost his job in May and could not find another one.
Jost was always one of my more genial neighbors--an irrepressible tinkerer married to a patient, loving wife, a devoted dad who helped build a raft of plastic pop bottles to float down the bayou for his daughter's Indian Princess tribe, a good-natured colleague who used a rueful laugh to get through the absurdities of the workday. But then, for Jost, there were no more workdays. His weekdays and weekends had blurred into one long, uninterrupted, seemingly infinite chasm of free time. I'd catch him puttering around his house in cargo shorts and a T-shirt in the afternoons, raking his sable-hued hair away from his quizzical face, steadying his wire-rimmed glasses on his noble nose, occupying himself by painting trim that didn't really need painting or waxing floors that were already gleaming. At first I thought of Jost as being between jobs--so did he--and in tact, after losing one job last spring, he'd gotten another right away. But then/hat position evaporated too, and a few weeks of unemployment began to stretch, languidly and insidiously, into months. Eight of them so far.
It wasn't long before Jost stopped appreciating the "gift" of free afternoons with his seven-year-old son and evenings devoted to homework with his twelve-year-old daughter. He wanted to get back to work but instead found himself trapped in a grown-up version of musical chairs, in which there was, suddenly, no spot for him. Once, he'd been overwhelmed with work, serving as the point man for myriad companies--half marketing executive, half tech guru--helping them to integrate their old identifies with their new Internet presence. Jost was connected 24-7, armed with the requisite cell phone, BlackBerry, laptop, and frequent-flier plan. Now, he sent out resumes and no one responded. He hustled for interviews and no one called. He imagined all sorts of slights and snubs from his working friends. All day, every day, he navigated the waves of his own panic: His unemployment checks would cease in February; his daughter's private-school tuition would remain at $10,000 a year; he and his wife, Rebecca, were borrowing from savings they'd put aside for the kids' college and their retirement. How was he supposed to do that math?
Jost's state of affairs struck him as not just nonsensical but incomprehensible. He was a white male, 47, who had voted, in equal measure, for Republicans and Democrats. Until last year, he and his wife brought in a combined income in the low six figures, which allowed them to settle, with their children, into a nice home in a nice Houston neighborhood. His family enjoyed New Mexico ski vacations and Caribbean cruises. Dinner out at will. Fun money for the kids. And then, through some seemingly in explicable changes in the economic climate, the Lunstroths' tide of prosperity began to recede, until Jost began to fear it would evaporate entirely. "I'm trying not to become a cynic," he told me one day last fall, in a sharp, flat tone I'd never heard him use before.
Jost was not alone. In the past year, I'd seen other dads--up the block, around the state, across the country--in the same situation. Most of them were in their forties, white, and educated: they were used to making good salaries and contributing their share to society. They were men who should have been at the peak of their power and ability who were, instead, chronically out of work, ever-present at after-school pickup and PTA meetings. With the dubious luxury of ample free time, they were forced to rethink their life plans and to wonder whether the order they had worked so hard to establish was always as illusory as it seemed today.
The most optimistic economic reports claim that these men will be back at work by spring. ("The phrase 'jobless recovery' may no longer apply," heralded the Houston Chronicle in November.) But the strength of this recovery remains uncertain. Employers are still reluctant to bring on new employees; any working person knows that companies are doing more with fewer people to keep profits healthy. The recent job growth trumpeted by the administration is mainly in lower-paying service jobs (restaurants, retail) and in temporary work. Many manufacturing and low-end tech positions have been shipped overseas. A large number of people whose unemployment benefits have run out are now reported in government statistics as working, not as people who have given up looking. In Texas, uncertainty over the energy business continues to limit innovation and expansion.
What has changed for certain in the past few years--the years of this latest economic down-turn, from 2000 until now--is the world of unemployment. Like everything else in this country, it's been altered by the values and (former) affluence of the people who've joined it; it's more mechanized, more modernized, more exploitative, and more...
|
