NIGHT SWEATS

The Summer Solstice has finally ended. A great day goes down, flaming. The new night has begun. But it's a cold slap in the face; not the gentle arms needed to rock myself to sleep. Congress has seemingly decided NOT to continue to support we workers on the streets, still seeking gainful employment. Some kind of behind the scenes bartering with our lives is going on while we bleed.

I'm not waxing hyperbolic. This is real. Not some made for t.v. movie. Knowing I'm only one of hundreds of thousands doesn't fill me with warm fuzzies. I remember the Titanic. I remember WWII camps and Depression Soup Kitchen lines. This isn't pretend. I've been out of work a year and a half. The longest stint in my workaholic lifetime. Begun when I was thirteen, I've always had at least one job--often several--balancing it out with school. For a year and a half I've sent out resumes and got no responses. I've networked with friends, hundreds of friends, relatives, colleagues, people randomly met in grocery lines or coffee shops. (Yeah, even the unemployed have to buy t.p. and the occasional cup of French Roast.) I've wired home--a place I've run from for thirty-plus years--to let them know, I don't know what to do now that my savings are used up. I may have to crash. Do you know what it is like to tell your eighty year old parental units that you have to, after three decades of self-sufficiency on the farther coast, "come home to crash"? They aren't pleased. It doesn't easily fit into their lifestyle, nor what they hoped and dreamed for their "gifted" eldest child. But, there it is.

Without health care for the last two years, I've tried to keep myself together. Eating right, excercising. Meditating. Doing what fulfills me. Seeing positive friends. Letting folks know what my true state of mind is and not faking it. But the blood pressure, even under prescribed meds, is so stressed out at the news that Congress is not extending our benefits...what can I do? What am I supposed to do?

As an action-oriented sort of "gal", I've written to my Senators and I've ever written to the White House--both Mr. and Ms. I've pleaded on behalf of not only myself, the educated, published, 54 year old single female who has worked her whole life at non-profits and has profitted, not, by doing so. (I know, wah wah for me...maybe I shoulda known better...maybe I shoulda prepared for this day by doing something like being a real estate broker...oh wait, that industry is crashing around us, too...hmmm...or a journalist...but wait...all the writers I know are pretty much out on unemployment too, fired or laid off or their publications in full on bankruptcy, too...maybe I should have been a doctor like in my one-time childhood fantasy...but I hear these days doctors are turning from their professions because of sky rocketing insurance rates and no safety nets for high-risk patients without incomes...so what was I supposed to do, given my skills, talents, interests and all the "follow your dreams" information of the seventies when I was in college and still believing I could make a difference in the World...or that I owed the world a life...my life...hmmm...)

So aside from sending resumes, pounding pavement, networking, being open minded and willing to take a position far far far below what I've held in the past, being willing to retrain, retry, even, if forced to retire (if there was some sort of income), what else can I do? Right now? Where am I supposed to go--and thousands like me. Hundreds of thousands, if we follow the news. Let's just multiply that a bit...one news report states that the jobless rate is down! Another states that another hundred thousand are out of work in California from the laid off infrastructure...another states that insurance companies and pension plans continue to show some profits...while another web report says that there will be no more pensions and social security and we are all screwed...Where are we supposed to go?

I can't sleep after such a beautiful day. I can't see what I'm gonna do. I can barely breathe.
This roller coaster has to come into the station at some point and allow us off. While the Senators and Congresspeople go to their lunches and their clean offices and their cleaner homes and figure out strategy to hold their jobs, their benefits, their lives together for a few more years, what are the rest of us to do? Anybody out there listening? This isn't an abstraction: this is a human being running scared in the middle of the night.

Our numbers are growing.