Oppenheim Arts & Letters

One Working Man - Scraping Along

"Employment in construction held steady (15,000) in March. The industry had lost an average of 72,000 jobs per month in the prior 12 months." [1, p.2]

"Contractors laid off 110,000 more workers in April. This matches the average monthly layoffs over the last six months. Contractors have shed 1,370,000 jobs in the last three years. Not surprisingly, previously very strong construction wage growth has ended." [2]

"The jobless rate, which was 7.4 percent in December, hasn't been this high since the spring of 1983. Employers cut 2,500 jobs in January, the 18th straight month of losses." [5]

"At that point, I looked up and took a good look at the people that were in the storehouse. This is when I lost it. (And here comes the judgmental part.) These people were not what you would call of high caliber. You could tell by their tattered clothes and general manner that these were people who were used to struggling. For them, a difficult lifestyle was all they had ever known, and I’m certain that many of their choices had only exacerbated their problems." [5]

"Others who lost their jobs have formed small or solo practitioner business. And some who saw the writing on the wall found new work before being laid off.

But the majority of people interviewed for this story who lost their jobs during the recession are still combing the want ads and trolling online job sites for hours each day, while tweaking their résumés and interviewing skills in hopes of rejoining the work force soon." [7]

Intimate social reporting among the ranks of the unemployed presents difficulties, the first of which is "who really wants to talk about it"?

And who wants to use their real name?

As a blogger, I've had the experience, just once and that was enough, of rescinding a post about a woman and her family facing eviction, a story the subject thought helpful in extremis but shameful as soon as the emergency resolved itself.

Next: who "in the muck" wants to drill down into their own psychology, labor bandwidth, life habits, habits of mind, and decision-making ethics and other forms of personal beliefs and values, including self-concept, to address the array of daily challenges and terrors attending the fine state of "Being Betwixed and Between"?

Even if willing--able?

Introspection as a capability may be considered a function of education and the many frameworks and theories an appropriately educated man or woman has to draw on figuring their own psychological and social character, makeup, and place.

The press?  My impression of The Press is that its main bodies serve up pablum for yuppies: tales of the desparate involved with computer-interlaced job boards and social communities.  One feels their pain, of course, but someone else provides the basis for the observation of "seeing people lose their homes."

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For several months now, I have watched a neighbor struggle day to day within the context of the last years of a career in construction as a heavy equipment operator. 

Unemployment settled in with the winter's snow season--and what a winter 2009-2010 had been--and rounds of unemployment compensation and small change derived from Ebay sales ensued. 

For this neighbor, more grasshopper than ant to this beleaguered stage, the experience of crisis has followed on a lifetime of imprudent decisions, some involving vice, some involving being perhaps too helpful to others and running through his own reserves to be so, but all involving a quintessentially gung-ho American identification with the hard-drivin', hard-drinkin', high school educated, ex-military, don't-need-no-help independent roughneck whose pride of place would seem expressed by the possession of a full-sized, blazing red, 4x4 Dodge RAM pickup (albeit ten years old) and leather aprons bulging with Snap-on tools, never mind the 48 years of wear on the body and the beer, beef, and pork product accumulation of 268 pounds hung on a refrigerator-like frame, all that plus the annual loss after work season of health insurance.

The misery index climbs high with borrowing, with disappointing online sales, with the emergence of a painfully infected tooth -- quick: emergency room visit or dentist willing to provide emergency care and a prescription of Vicodin for under $100 and, later, an extraction for $168.00?

Answer: the latter (without a dime to spare).

Ambition, appropriate to age and what I might call the more true personality: to deal in antiques and collectibles.  The neighbor continues to work on acquiring his first computer, a refurbished Dell laptop already set aside by an independent refurbisher who will ship when he sees a $500 contribution (of an $850 sales) in his bank account.

Grace, all things considered: a job on a bulldozer about 80 miles from the apartment, a job currently compelling a 2:30 a.m. commute to beat Washington, D.C.'s I-70 and Beltway traffic.  There'a union involved, and the work pays well, but the neighbor, whose big ol' red pickup gets 15 miles per gallon, has been leasing a Hyundai ($175 per week, but 35 miles or so per gallon) to get to it, a scheme as out of whack as anything else in the desparate financial atmosphere.

Body, ego, and soul have their expenses, and no matter how poor, how empiriled, how embattled one may be, some part of the costs prersist in riding along with the business of breathing.

The neighbor has been armed with lists of area and regional contractors (in addition to his main employer, who has fielded several calls weekly through the ordeal most may refer to as "scraping along"; also lists of "community oriented" employment and health centers, soup kitchens and pantries, all of which have so far been brushed aside, denial and finances keeping just one step ahead of the perception of the scope of the personal challenge and extent of the tragedy surrounding it.

This week, the neighbor brought a woman aboard, early forties, from West Virginia, and fresh off the street after an apartment renting partner skipped to care for an ill adult child in another town, so goes the tale.

I wonder: is this how the economy thins the herd?

Is there a better way to effectively manage middle-aged labor as it transitions, whether it likes it or not, away from the abilities, decisions, and habits of its youth and youthful biology, before it scrapes along into finding itself out of rent, cell phone money, truck insurance, and groceries?

My neighbor, also perhaps characterized in American lingo as "Bubba" or the guy in the bib overalls and dirty work boots, works a high-end vacuum around the apartment in his off time, keeps a curio of interesting baubles, knows his Fenton glass and Tiffany desk sets, and studies Kovels' [8] on the side.

The neighbor has been fond of the phrase "Roll the dice!" He's done as much in Vegas, even passed an evening in Dennis Rodman's company, so he says, but get right down to it, rolling dice might be the farthest thing from his mind today. Rather, juggling location, work-season income, Ebay entrepreneuring (plus, soon to come, computer education and computer-centric worries, if not education in general), and overall operating expenses seems more compelling. 

Add in layers of local family issues--the father in the assisted care facility begging to go back to his home, the stepmother who has curtailed the neighbor's access to storage shed in which he has saleables in the way of catering equipment and machine tools, etc. and is eager to get them to market to generate that mannah we call "cold, hard cash".

Of problems: no end and all sustained on a thin line of uncertain income, which in construction in the Mid-Atlantic becomes an income certain to end with freezing weather and snow.  Nonetheless, I've suggested considering a household move closer to the job, which construction concludes in 2013, but he's making his stand in this place, close by the area in which he grew up--i.e., Catoctin Mountain, Thurmont, Maryland, a childhood spent within sight of Camp David.

I've told the neighbor, "I cannot keep you from your fate."

All ends in death, of course, but we may all hope for a more comfortable journey on the way to that point of departure.

Reference

1. Bureau of Labor Statistics.  "Economic News Release": Employment Situation Summary."  U.S. Department of Labor, April 2, 2010: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

2. Haughey, Jim.  "Construction Layoffs Continue at Deep Recession Pace."  Reed Construction Data, May 12, 2009: http://www.reedconstructiondata.com/news/2009/05/construction-layoffs-continue-at-deep-recession-pace/

3. Haughey, Jim.  "Underwater mortgages problems will restrain housing expansion."  Notes from Jim Haughey, Reed Construction Data, April 6, 2010: http://www.reedconstructiondata.com/jim-haughey/

4. The Layoff: http://thelayoff.com/

5. Hopkins, Jamie Smith.  "Maryland jobless rate edges up to 7.5 percent in January."  The Baltimore Sun, March 10, 2010: http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2010-03-10/business/bal-maryland-unemployment-0310_1_maryland-jobless-rate-edges-labor-force-job-seekers

6. Parker, Andrew.  "Tales of the Unemployed - The Bishop's Storehouse."  Andrew's Amusing Anecdotes, January 20, 2009: http://andrewrparker.wordpress.com/2009/01/20/tales-of-the-unemployed-the-bishops-storehouse/

7. Warnack, Heather Harlan.  "Maryland jobless 'come to grips with situation'.  Baltimore Business Journal, August 14, 2009: http://baltimore.bizjournals.com/baltimore/stories/2009/08/17/story1.html?q=Maryland jobless personal histories

8. Kovel, Terry and Kim Kovel.  Kovels' Antiques & Collectibles: Price Guide 2010.  New York: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 2009.

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Out of the Fog of Words

The Talmud is second only to the Bible in its importance and influence as a source book of Jewish religion. The term “Talmud” (literally “study”) is generic: there are actually two Talmuds, the larger and more authoritative Babylonian Talmud containing the teachings of the Babylonian Jewish sages (the so-called Amoraim) who lived in the third to fifth centuries, and the smaller Jerusalem (or Palestinian) Talmud which presents the teachings of the sages who lived in the Land of Israel in the third and fourth centuries. Both Talmuds are structured in the form of commentaries on the Mishna, the code of traditional law compiled about 200 C.E. by Rabbi Y’huda haNasi in the Galilee, which contains the teachings of the earlier sages (the so-called Tannaim) who lived in the first and second centuries C.E. In distinction from the Mishna, which is always brief and succinct, the voluminous Talmudic commentary appended to it is called the Gemara. The Jerusalem Talmud contains ca. 800,000 words; the Babylonian ca. 2,500,000 words. In the two Talmuds references are made to ca. two hundred Tannaim and no less than two thousand Amoraim. Both Talmuds are written partly in Hebrew and partly in Aramaic; the latter was the colloquial tongue in Palestine and in Babylonia in those days. [1]

Note that minor term: "Palestinian Talmud."

While the Middle East Conflict may have been cast in 1948 as a fight about land, it may have been always--and from long before 1948--an argument about literature.  In fact, while scholars involved with studies of culture and religion have been well aware of the breadth of commentary and expressive work churned up and out of each domain, the same would seem a dimension of which the general public has been and remains blissfully but cursedly unaware.  Such makes for a particularly hazy sense of causality in conflicts birthed on the engines of intellectual drivers.

There's no need for that old ignorance today. 

For any with the slightest interest in Islam, Dar-us-Salam Publications may quite handily provide access to a body of literature " . . . free from sectarianism and in accordance with the Qur'an and Sunnah."  Web address: http://www.dar-us-salam.com/about_us.htm

From the memorable experience of it, I may heartily recommend spending a few hours to days with Saifure Rahman al-Mubarakpuri's Saudi prize winning history Ar-Raheeq Al-Makhtum (The Sealed Nectar): Memoirs of the Noble Prophet, which features a witnessed account of the descent of the Angel Gabriel.

For interest in Judaism and Jewish culture and life, I know of no central publishing operation equivalent to Dar-us-Salam (and if you should know of one, please provide me with that information), but one may start  making rounds with the following: http://www.judaism.com/books/index.asp and http://www.artscroll.com.

Of course there are many other portals through which to encounter through language Judaism and Jewish culture--off the top: The Jewish Virtual Library (http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/), the Wikipedia start page titled "Judaism" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaism) -- just follow the headers beneath the Star of David -- and for any in the Tribe finding himself a little bit lost, there is, happily, Judaism 101 (http://www.jewfaq.org/index.htm) and Aish.com (http://www.aish.com/).

While our main and modern issue may no longer involve the provision of access to a diverse and immense corpus of cultural and religious literature, it certainly involves something near to it: access to time, and, related, encouragement of the love of reading for hours on end.

Who has time?

Who would today want to spend it reading?

If you should be so lucky as to account yourself two affirmatives, look around and ask "Who else?"

For the few who do have time, focus counts too, and that's become a hard thing to maintain, funded for it or not, in our fast-paced and media-soaked intellectual environment wired tight by global communications.

What makes this most annoying is that while people will kill one another, en masse, over matters confined largely to their heads, interest in "content of mind" seems confined to a relative handful of pundits and scholars when the same should become the province of every teacher of language and comparative literature and of some interest to every generally educated reader.

The origins of attitudes -- or beliefs and how we feel about them -- may be hazy at a glance across many dimensions in living, but all have their grounding in something one has experienced, heard, or read and then synthasized and revised.

The origins of law too have evolved out of ancient oral and written traditions, and one may well follow threads from the well known Moses to the fairly well known Maimonides to the positively obscure Lassa Oppenheim, an early 20th Century Cambridge professor, also Jewish, responsible for the world's first comprehensive and still influential English-language volume on international law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L._F._L._Oppenheim).

In this most blessed day, one may read from a body of literature firmly established between the ancient Moses and the modern perceptive legal scholar Oppenheim.  Not that I wish to tackle the Mishnah, but the same is as available for purchase in English as The Sealed Nectar, and here is a URL to it: http://www.artscroll.com/mishnah.html.

Reference

1. Patai, Raphael.  Gates To the Old City: A Book of Jewish Legends.  Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1981.

2. Al-Mubarakpuri, Saifur Rahman.  Al-Makhtum, Ar-Raheeq (The Sealed Nectar): Memoirs of the Noble Prophet. 

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