Every day, I receive at least one Email from a clergyperson or lay leader whose synagogue, church, or mosque is in serious financial trouble —- because the congregants are hurting. Some have lost jobs, others are frightened. Some are working harder and longer to “protect”” their jobs, and have no time left over for community or God.
It’s not “just” anecdotes, of course; the national numbers bear this out, and the anecdotes put flesh and blood upon the numbers. The official unemployment rate is now over 10% — the worst since before World War II.
If you include those would-be workers who have been turned down for jobs so often that they have given up looking, the unemployment rate in the USA is over 17%.
One family of every four has suffered a job loss in the last year. These losses damage everything — nutritious food, adequate health care, pursuing an education, even religious life — as thousands of synagogues, churches, and mosques are finding when their congregants’ contributions of money and time dry up. And the job losses continue.
I have been using the official word for this — unemployment. But that sounds like somemebody stubbing their toe on the way to the job and ending up, by accident, “un”employed. In actuality, someone’s decisions destroyed those jobs. DISemployment is a more honest word.
But official Washington (including President Obama) and official Big Business don’t care.
They are operating according to a bitterly sarcastic teaching by the poet Carl Sandburg:
Stocks are property, yes.
Bonds are property, yes.
Jobs are property?
No, nix, nah, nah. Read more »
