While Congress considers heading home for a third vacation without passing a bill to extend unemployment benefits for millions of down and nearly out on the street Americans, we thought we would consider how their deliberations are effecting the everyday lives of Joe and Jane Nobody.
Welcome to Bumdom, defined by the Urban Dictionary as the kingdom of lazy jobless people. Only tramps and losers live in this crazy, hopeless, nobody gives a $hit world. While it is not so much a physical place as it is a state of mind, it is a place where people who have exercised their very last legal options in life go to simply fade away, or for the hardcore survivor types, a place to start considering their illegal options.
Nevertheless, in all actuality, and fairness, it is not that far of a fall into the Kingdom of Bumdom in America these days, as many Americans start their lives not very far from that world in the first place. In today’s podcast, we try to discover how somebody enters the Kingdom of Bumdom and or how one becomes a bum, a loser, a tramp or the chronically underemployed.
With the crummy, outdated, expensive educational and advanced training opportunities that America offers to its average citizen, one can only realistically look forward to a rather marginal existence in this country under the best of circumstances. More often than not, the average Joe and to a lesser extent, Jane Nobody, has fewer options than days past, so any disruption in continuous employment could and often does spell catastrophe.If we face the hard and embarrassing numbers of those who have reportedly given up looking for work because their situation kept them at the bottom of the career ladder, we will see all the office managers, sales assistants, construction workers, maintenance crews, real estate professionals, day labors, road workers, retail sales, etc, etc, etc, facing really hard choices.
When the hard choices of the long term unemployed go from making minimum credit card payments and paying the rent or sacrificing healthcare coverage, you know they are moving closer to their new address at the intersection of Buddy Can You Spare a Buck Blvd and Losers Lane.
The purpose of this podcast is not to bleed all over our audience, as we are keenly aware of the cost involved in keeping food on the tables of folks who are no longer contributing to the base economy. Those on the political right will argue and rightly so, America is broke and we just do not have the dough to save everybody.
The Republicans are willing to chance the bootstrap philosophy, the every tub stands on its own bottom, the only the strongest should survive anyway mindset and hope enough big government haters will be with them in November.
Here is where the Republicans are willing to chance the analogy of the lost group in the desert with a limited water supply. We have stragglers weakened by the elements, hunger, thirst and illness. Hence, the difficult decisions must be made concerning continuing to provide valuable resources to those who probably cannot complete the journey, for they risk jeopardizing the prospects of the stronger members in the group. After all, we do not know how much further before we reach the next oasis.
At this point, the Republicans are reasoning that somebody has to be left behind to die. And while this “new” fiscally responsible Republican Party has a very good point to take refuge behind, we also think we should keep the human face of the problem in clear view.
Unfortunately, the human face of the long term unemployed also includes the faces of their children. Some of those little faces will be slapped in stress filled anger. The violence will not necessarily be for anything the child may have done wrong, but just because that is a face that cannot be fed today. Sometimes, a wife might not see her husband’s face for a few days because he loses face whenever facing the fact that he cannot provide the basic needs of his loved ones. If we added in all the faceless single mothers struggling alone to make ends meet, we’d have another ocean of tears to cry.
No, we think there has to be a way to help the millions of prideful Americans willing to work, while weeding out the goldbrickers willing to gamble living large on less than $300 a week. Click here for the podcast
