The Unemployment Blues

Hola Everybody,
If you’re reading this, you know I’m not working right now. Needless to say, this past year has been enormously challenging for me. In any case, having spoken with other broke motherfuckers unemployed people and taking my experiences into account, I’m writing the following in the hopes that it can help others in my situation.




And Moms? If you’re reading this, I am OK -- really I am. LOL

Unemployment as a Public Health Issue

If heaven really exists: then heaven is the job, hell is unemployment, while life is merely an interview.
 -- Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Sometimes I feel as if I live in a multiverse. In one universe, I am a well-adjusted, if financially challenged individual. In another parallel reality, I’m going through hell, am fantastically depressed, and not coping well at all. LOL I think a lot of how I’m feeling is the result of my accumulated experiences. I have been, after all, in places and situations most people never survive. I know adversity all too well and so I have been able to adapt in ways that keep me “healthy.” I also have a support network of friends and family that really help me keep it together. Without them, I’d be stark raving mad. Unfortunately this is not true of everyone. 

Most discussions of unemployment are framed from an economic perspective. However, unemployment-- especially long-term unemployment -- is a public health issue. It is hard to quantify, but I’m willing to bet that suicides, the destruction of family cohesion, and the wholesale evisceration of communities are just some of the consequences of unemployment. In fact, did you know that being unemployed could possibly kill you? One study, for example, found that unemployment was strongly linked to increased long-term mortality. In this study, researchers tried to statistically control for other pre-existing risk factors, such as age, weight, smoking, excess drinking, social class, and other factors. Still, the increased risk was 47 percent. 

Why are unemployed people at greater risk? What could be a reason for these higher rates of mortality? Research has shown that unemployed people are more likely to have poor health habits, characterized by excess drinking, smoking, lack of exercise, and a sedentary lifestyle. The fear of unemployment has been linked to increased cholesterol levels. Research indicates that higher death rates of previously-unemployed individuals (followed over a 24-year period) are related to higher rates of suicide, accidents, cancer and cardiovascular disease. The fact that these health risks continue for 24 years suggests that unemployment is a potentially dangerous life event.

Research also indicates that unemployment is associated with a range of increased health problems. For individuals with no prior health problems, being fired or laid off increased the risk of fair or poor health by 83 percent in one study. In a study of 13,451 adults followed over an 18-year period, previous unemployment was linked to a significant increase of acute myocardial infarction. This risk was most pronounced in the first year of unemployment. The longer you are unemployed and the more frequently you are unemployed, the greater the cumulative risk. Indeed, the risks associated with unemployment may be of the same magnitude -- or greater -- as smoking, diabetes and hypertension. 

I believe that one of the most pernicious effects of unemployment is the isolation that one experiences. It might seem easy for you to tell someone to keep their spirits up, but do you really understand what that entails? I’ll give you a personal example. For decades, one of the highlights of my week has been meeting with my members of my support group and going out to dinner together. It may not sound like a lot, but this is a time of bonding, laughter, of sharing, and generally fellowship and good will. Because I am not working, I have tended to shy away from these important weekly meetings because I frankly cannot afford to dine out. I am fortunate that my friends seek me out and insist I participate and are only too happy to pay for my dinner. And I’m comfortable enough to accept their largesse without feeling too self-conscious, but I don’t go every week. 

I can only imagine how easy it is for others who may not have a network of supportive relationships, familial or otherwise. I’m lucky in that I have what some sociologists call “social capital,” but not everyone has that.

I also have the luxury of speaking to other people in situations similar to mine and we’re able to share about the feelings of shame and inadequacy that come with being unemployed. Sharing the feelings of stigma often helps to mitigate those feelings and it helps to know that it’s normal feel depressed or inadequate, or even to have feelings of having failed. If you see other people going through the same, you then understand that what you’re going through isn’t abnormal, or that there’s something wrong with you. Believe me, that kind of validation is a huge relief for someone going through the often catastrophic change of being unemployed.

So, what should be done? What are the implications in the face of these facts? First, unemployment should be considered a health-risk health factor. Organizations such as the Centers for Disease Control gear themselves to address these risks. Addressing the psychological and lifestyle effects of unemployment could significantly impact longer-term health of the unemployed (and underemployed). Second, the people who are experiencing unemployment should be empowered to address their health needs. I don’t care how much counseling you get, if you can’t afford to eat, you’re going to manifest health problems.

Third, there should be a national dialog on the issue of a basic guaranteed income.¹ Your life and health and, by extension, the health of you family, community, and nation should not hang solely on whether you been “downsized” -- a euphemism for corporate malfeasance. Being able to make ends meet should be a right and it would make us a stronger nation. And before you start mewling about the undeserving, or laziness, or economics, please consider the enormous economic and moral costs of living in a society that sees the unemployed as expendable. Think of the children of those who were driven to suicide, or who have succumbed to life-ending disease. 

Unemployment is not simply a minor inconvenience or a passing phase. And, for some, it may predict higher levels of risk that take a toll decades later. Recognizing unemployment as a health factor -- both for individuals and our society -- and providing the services to help address it negative impacts can have long-lasting preventative effects. 

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization… 

Need help? In the U.S., call 1-800-273-8255 for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.

Notes:

1. At the end of the ’60s, President Richard Nixon’s plan for a partial basic income passed the House of Representatives before stalling in the Senate. No longer a proposal of bleeding-heart lefties, basic income was endorsed by a slew of notable economists (including several who went on to nab Nobel Prizes).

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Make it Personal

Hola Everybody,
By tomorrow this time, we will know who will hold the most powerful political office in the known universe -- may your God, Higher Power, or whatever you fuckin' pray to, protect you. Regardless of who seize power, we will be fucked if we don't wake up. I repost the following in order to rail against the dying of the light. It gets lonely out here.

Politics

It’s personal.

The personal, as some are so fuckin’ fond of saying, is political. Therefore, if some idiot politician, some power player, tries to execute policies that harm you or those you love, take it personally.

Get Angry. 

The Machinery of Justice will not serve you here: it is slow and unfeeling, and it is theirs -- all of it. Only those without access to power suffer at the hand of Justice; the creatures of the power elite slide out from under with a wink and a grin.

If you want Justice, or even fairness, you will have to snatch it from them.

Make it personal.

Do as much damage as you can. Get your message across. That way you stand a far better chance of being taken seriously next time -- of being considered dangerous. And make no mistake about this: being taken seriously, being considered dangerous, marks the difference -- the only difference in their eyes -- between players and the little people. They don't give a damn about respect -- respect has no value for them. You have to make them fear and loathe you.

Players they will make their deals with. Little people they liquidate. And time and again, they justify your liquidation, your displacement, your suffering, and the brutality of it all with the ultimate insult that it’s the way of the world, it’s politics, it’s a tough life, it’s “just business,” and that it’s nothing personal. Well, fuck that...

Make it personal.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…

Escape from Freedom

Hola everybody,
I find myself rooting against the USA in the Olympics. 

Escape from Freedom

If you keep doing the same thing you keep getting the same results.

A week after I began facilitating workshops at New York’s notorious penal colony, Rikers Island, I was confronted with the scene of four men screaming in uncontrollable anger as they violently shook the bars that confined them in their “housing area.” My job was to lock into this housing area in order to deliver programs. That day’s group topic? Anger management. I stood there and I wondered how the hell I was going to do this. It was oppressively hot and there were no fans, not even a breeze. Part of the anger was due to the heat and the fact that many of the men felt they were being brutalized -- and in a very real way, they were being mistreated.

Being me, I smiled and asked my men at the gate (one was a cage fighter out in the street) what was the matter. I asked the correctional officer to open the gate and I took in a deep breath as I walked in and heard the gate close shut behind me. Don’t get me wrong, I never felt I was in danger from the men in my two different groups. On the contrary, they were very protective and loyal to me. Part of the reason I am not allowed to run groups at Rikers any longer is because I was able to forge a bond with the men detained there that the Department of Corrections (DOC) staff either didn’t like or understand. I often felt less comfortable around the guards and civilians than I did with the men detained at Rikers. 

In any case, I wondered how in the fuck I could run a group in which the room temperature was over 100 degrees and my participants were rightfully protesting treatment that would be considered inhuman by most international watchdog groups. In fact, my guys were saying, “We don’t want to hear no bullshit anger management shit today, Mr. Eddie!” LOL

So I struck a deal with them. I said that what I brought to the group that particular day, they could kick me out of the group. That brought some laughter, as many felt my quest was Quixotic at best. In any case, I bet the farm that I could teach the group something they could use that very moment. To do this, I had to throw away the book.

One big revelation for me was the realization that we subconsciously train others how to treat us. We do this through the messages we send through our body language, our tone of voice, and other subtle cues and behaviors. Unfortunately, mostly because our attention is often distracted, obscured, or lost in a past that has gone by or a future that doesn’t exist. 

So my first lesson was the important lesson that the ability to pay attention to what is happening in any given moment -- to our actions and their results -- is one of the basic principles of freedom. And yes, I was talking about freedom to a group that (rightfully) felt they had none. 

Failures and unwanted situations should serve to create new behaviors and different approaches. As the group talked about their grievances of not being listened to, we explored how these things happened. In the context of a jail or prison, conflict resolution takes shape within a bubble of apathy and violence. Feelings of powerlessness and the perception that you are not being listened to or valued may make you scream or talk louder. It might compel you to curse and make threats because the feeling is that you will not be heard otherwise. And while this may seem strange to you, consider how you would react if you felt your basic human rights were being trampled every day. My goal was to do what seemed like the impossible: to teach the practice of freedom where the very concept is held in contempt.

Part of the group entailed role-playing exercises that encouraged awareness of body movement, and the tone and timbre of the voice in various situations -- especially in stressful ones where we all tend to go unconscious and habitual, often mindless, strategies take over. For example, we noted one participant raised his hands and used his index finger in a menacing way though he was basically unaware of the gesture. Others noted that they screamed, but justified it by observing if they didn’t, the guards wouldn’t listen to them. I challenged on this, but that was hard because the hard reality is that in some ways they were correct. What I asked was that they looked at how they added or took away from the dysfunction.

I called in a guard and asked that he participant in some role play. Unfortunately, the guard refused, so I stood in and played the role of authority. Then I asked some of the participants to role play as a guard. That resulted in a lot of laughter, but I think some were able to see past the surface and see that they were humans (if fucked up in their views) just like they were humans. And in this way we all tried to explore how we could train others to treat as we felt we deserved to be treated.

I can’t say if I was successful that day. I know we got to laugh at some of the things we do without being aware of them and how our actions have real-time consequences in our lives. Most importantly, my desire was to communicate that even those who are confined have one basic freedom: we can choose how to respond. 

More on this soon.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…

Misquoting the Dream

Hola mi Gente,

The exploitation of King’s name, the distortion of his teachings by conservatives, is one of the uglier developments in contemporary American life. I agree with Michael Eric Dyson that the “I have a Dream” speech should be put to rest-- in my opinion for at least ten years.

* * *

Misquoting the Dream

A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him, in order to equip him to compete on a just and equal basis.

-- Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community?

When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was alive, mainstream society viewed him mostly with fear and contempt. In response to King’s anti-war stance (as expressed in a 1967 speech), TIME magazine called King a “demagogue for Radio Hanoi.” Years later, Reagan the Great damned King as a near communist.

Today, however, a miracle has taken place in America: Dr. King, it’s now been discovered, was a conservative! By taking a snippet from one 1963 address Dr. King has been co-opted by the right as the most quoted opponent of affirmative action in America today.

While the transformation of King from communist to conservative is almost complete, it deserves an explanation.

It should come as no surprise that Martin Luther King, Jr. would have his words taken out of context. After all, King’s status today effectively ensures that conservative writers, academics, pundits, and politicians will feel compelled to borrow King’s words to advance their warped agenda. What better political plum than claiming the ideological support of an iconic figure such as King? Nowhere is the tendency to “play the King card” more evident than in the claim by dozens of contemporary conservative writers, academics, pundits, and politicians that King’s basic goal was “color-blindness” and that he viewed such visual impairment as the road by which racism would best be addressed.

Typically, conservatives rely on one line from one speech. Of course it’s only the most famous line delivered by King, one of the few most folks have probably heard: the one from the 1963 March on Washington, the “I Have a Dream” speech in which he expressed the hope that one day persons “will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” For conservatives, this is proof that King would oppose race-conscious policies such as affirmative action, since -- after all -- such efforts require an acknowledgment of race.

Conservatives of all colors and stripes have clung to this line as a rallying cry in their war against “reverse discrimination.” Shelby Steele, for example, in The Content of Our Character (the title obviously used in order to evoke the famous King line) is a harsh critique of affirmative action policies, claiming they have “done more harm than good” and implying that King would agree. Steele seeks to prove this not only with reference to the “Dream” speech, but also by recounting a 1964 presentation in which King implored black youth to get ahead: the implication being that King was an apostle of the myth of rugged individualism and hostile to special efforts to provide full opportunities for people of color.

In similar fashion, many other conservatives have misrepresented King. If you’ve been on the internet for any amount of time, I am sure you have run up against the now ubiquitous practice of the cutting-and-pasting of the Kool-Aid King. See if you notice any of the following... 

Clint Bolick, a leading critic of affirmative action, wrote in 1996 that King did not seek “special treatment” for blacks, and cites the “content of their character” remark as justification for his position. Tamar Jacoby wrote in 1998 that King’s “dream” was color-blindness. The Thernstroms, in the social science bible, America in Black and White, make the same claim. Paul Sniderman wrote, “The civil rights movement... took as its ideal a truly colorblind society, where, as Martin Luther King Jr. prophesied, our children would be judged... ” by, yup, you guessed it, you know what.

Some have gone further and have advanced the notion that the modern civil rights movement’s support of affirmative action is a betrayal of King. Dinesh D'Souza (who has been convicted for his lack of impulse control) in End of Racism, states authoritatively that affirmative action is a “... repudiation of King’s vision, in that it involves a celebration and affirmation of group identity.” He makes the bold assertion that Black leaders are the antithesis of Martin Luther King's principles, which he defines as the ideology that “race should be ignored and we should be judged on our merits as persons.” Strangely, D'Souza calls for the repeal of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, arguably the greatest legislative achievement of the movement King led. Thanks to corporate-controlled, activist, conservative Supreme court, D’Souza, unlike King, has seen his dream come to fruition.

Yet, despite the overwhelming noise by the right that Dr. King principally sought color-blindness and would have opposed affirmative action, even a cursory examination of his writings makes such a position extremely difficult to defend. King never said he believed that the best way to achieve the dream of racial and economic equality was to pretend racism had vanished. Nothing could be further from his stated principles. In fact, contrary to the popular modern fiction advanced by conservatives, King favored quotas, affirmative action, reparations, and race-based hiring as immediate relief from systemic racism. This is an unpleasant bit of history to those who have tried to turn him into a (safely dead) black conservative with which to bash liberals. But they were his actual views. 

From the outset, King placed responsibility for the nation’s racial inequality squarely on whites. In an article written in 1956 and included in James Washington’s edited collection, Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., King wrote that whites had “rejected the very center of their own ethical professions... and so they rationalized” the conditions under which they had forced blacks to live. In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail in 1963, King specifically criticized white ministers and white moderates, who he condemned for being “more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice,” and whom he said were perhaps more of a barrier to true freedom for blacks than the Klan. This is the letter in which he famously wrote that an unjust law was no law at all. In short, King was hardly color-blind. He was clear who he felt were the victims and who the chief perpetrators of racism were -- and he said so in clear and forceful language.

It is true that King called for universal programs of economic and educational opportunity for all the poor, regardless of race. However, he also saw the need for programs targeted at the victims of American racial apartheid. King was even clearer on affirmative action. In a 1963 article in Newsweek (published the very month of the “I Have a Dream” speech), King suggested it might be necessary to have something similar to “discrimination in reverse” as a form of national atonement for the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow segregation.

The most direct articulation of his views on the subject is found in 1963, in Why We Can't Wait, King noted:

Whenever this issue of compensatory or preferential treatment for the Negro is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree, but he should ask for nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it is not realistic. For it is obvious that if a man enters the starting line of a race three hundred years after another man, the first would have to perform some incredible feat in order to catch up.

In a 1965 Playboy interview, King spelled out what that something special might entail, and it was far more substantive than affirmative action. In fact, King stated his support for an aid package for Black America for $50 billion.

I am not saying that King's thoughts on this issue should be the determining factor on how people should feel about affirmative action or other race-conscious efforts. How they feel and think about the legacy and abiding problem of white racism is up to them. No one should assume that simply because Dr. King appears to have supported such efforts that this necessarily makes King, and those who support affirmative action today, correct.

I am trying to point out how conservatives are compelled to link their views to King in an attempt to dismantle or disparage such programs (and misrepresent and warp King’s message in the process). I find it the height of dishonesty and hypocrisy to claim the mantle of King's moral authority. Regardless of the debate over the effectiveness or legitimacy of affirmative action, it is only fair and just to insist that we present King’s views honestly and completely and not attempt to use his words for purposes he would have found unacceptable.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…