12th
& 13th June, 2008
New concerts announced!
Click HERE for details.
July autograph signing
event.
Click HERE for details.
|
|
Photo by Dan Chapman ©2001
Stanyan Entertainment Group
A Thought for Today
Like just about everything else,
triskaidekaphobia works if you want it to work.
TO BEGIN WITH
There won’t be another Friday the 13th until next February so give this
one all you’ve got.
Today’s “Worth Reading” is by the perceptive New York Times columnist
Bob Herbert and it points out a problem that nobody, not the government,
most of the main stream press and neither of this year’s presidential
candidates, seem eager to address.
WORTHREADING
OUT OF SIGHT
By BOB HERBERT
Published: New York Times / June 10, 2008
When the dismal unemployment numbers were released on Friday (at the
same time that oil prices were surging to record highs), I thought about
the young people at the bottom of the employment ladder.
Below the bottom, actually.
A shudder went through the markets when the Labor Department reported
that the official jobless rate had jumped one-half a percentage point in
May to 5.5 percent — the sharpest spike in 22 years.
The young people I’m talking about wouldn’t have noticed. These are the
teenagers and young adults — roughly 16 to 24 years old — who are not in
school and basically have no hope of finding work. The bureaucrats
compiling the official unemployment rate don’t even bother counting
these young people. They are no one’s constituency. They might as well
not exist.
Except that they do exist. There are four million or more of these
so-called disconnected youths across the country. They hang out on
street corners in cities large and small — and increasingly in suburban
and rural areas.
If you ask how they survive from day to day, the most likely response
is: “I hustle,” which could mean anything from giving haircuts in a
basement to washing a neighbor’s car to running the occasional errand.
Or it could mean petty thievery or drug dealing or prostitution or
worse.
This is the flip side of the American dream. The United States economy,
which has trouble producing enough jobs to keep the middle class intact,
has left these youngsters all-but-completely behind.
“These kids are being challenged in ways that my generation was not,”
said David Jones, the president of the Community Service Society of New
York, which tries to develop ways to connect these young men and women
with employment opportunities, or get them back into school.
It is extremely difficult because, for the most part, the jobs are not
there and the educational establishment is having a hard enough time
teaching the kids who are still in school.
“Schools have not made much of an effort to bring this population back
in,” said Mr. Jones. “Once you fall out of the system, you’re basically
on no one’s programmatic radar screen.”
So these kids drift. Some are drawn to gangs. A disproportionate number
become involved in crime. It is a tragic story, and very few people are
paying attention.
The economic policies of the past few decades have favored the wealthy
and the well-connected to a degree that has been breathtaking to behold.
The Nation magazine has devoted its current issue to the Gilded Age-type
inequality that has been the result.
Just a little bit of help to the millions of youngsters trying to get
their first tentative foothold in that economy should not be too much to
ask.
It’s not as if these kids don’t want to work. Many of them search and
search until they finally become discouraged. The summer job market,
which has long been an important first step in preparing teenagers for
the world of work, is shaping up this year as the weakest in more than
half a century, according to the Center for Labor Market Studies at
Northeastern University in Boston.
Now, with the overall economy deteriorating, the situation for poorly
educated young people will only grow worse. As Andrew Sum, director of
the Center for Labor Market Studies, told The Times recently:
“When you get into a recession, kids always get hit the hardest. Kids
always go to the back of the hiring queue. Now, they find themselves
with a lot of other people in line ahead of them.”
As the ranks of these youngsters grow, so does their potential to become
a destabilizing factor in the society.
More important, the U.S. needs the untapped talent (and the potential
buying power) in this large pool of young people, just as it needs the
talents of the many other Americans of all ages whose energy,
intelligence and creativity are wasted in an economic system that is not
geared toward providing jobs for everyone who wants to work.
America needs to dream bigger, and in this election year, job creation
should be issue No. 1. If I were running for president, I would pull
together the smartest minds I could find from government, the corporate
world, the labor movement, academia, the nonprofits and ordinary working
men and women to see what could be done to spark the creation of decent
jobs on a scale that would bring the U.S. as close as possible to full
employment.
We’ve maxed out the credit cards, floated mindlessly in stock market
bubbles, refinanced mortgages to death — now’s the time to figure out
how to put all Americans to work.
©2008 The New York Times & Bob Herbert. All Rights Reserved
Click
on the Stanyan House logo to buy Rod McKuen books, CD's and lots more
Click on the heart logo to
subscribe to the Rod McKuen mailing list
Catch Rod McKuen live!
Click on the links below for details of
concerts and appearances.
ROD McKUEN
CONCERTS
ROD
McKUEN APPEARANCES
|
