Meditations on Unemployment, Politics and the Summer of Despair

For the past couple years, as the Ohio Collegiate restructuring unfolded, the angst and dread over my future, both as an academic and a rent payer,  have sought long distance, off peak, and sometimes beer fueled (on my end) conversations with my dear friend, colleague (is it weird to still have colleagues when one no longer has an institution?) and mentor Susan Naomi Bernstein. I have always found her counsel wise, her optimism heartening, and the integrity of not only her pedagogy but the world view from which it sprang to be both a comfort and a battle cry: Tikkun Olam. Heal the World.

This hasn’t always been easy, and I’ve found myself of late reflecting her moral authority back, her counsel. Like many Americans, including this one writing, she has found herself on the outside looking in, between positions…euphemisms aside, she, like me, and like the over 9 percent of Americans (this, of course, does not include those who are no longer eligible for assistance) are on their asses and without work. And like many Americans, it is difficult to maintain any sense of optimism and not giving in to despair when the news is almost invariably shitty. 

This summer has been particularly difficult for both of us; both of us have been engaged in exhausting—and disappointing—job searches and interview processes.  I have been teaching, finishing a thirty credit hour graduate certificate, for five years (autumn, winter, spring, summer, rinse, repeat) knowing that my department would likely be dissolved, and for the last year, knowing that my contract would not be renewed, and I would teach my last class the night before I was officially separated.  On top of this, we both lost a friend, colleague, inspiration and beer buddy, Adam Vine, to the lightless void of suicide.

Through on top of that the ridiculous Rochambeau of our politics, the overheated rhetoric of the Dick Armey’s 2010 useful congressional idiots, the spineless pandering of the President, who we had invested so much into and seemed to be just another spokes model for the crypto-Reagonomics of the Clinton- era “Neo”Liberalism (or, when the New Left decided to work at Dad’s bank and go to Dead shows on the weekend), things seemed bleak. Depression and hopelessness set in: exhausted, and it seemed that the bad guys would win.  The America that had the promise to change things, to continue toward that more perfect union, that could build things and create living wages, the America that if you worked hard, found your niche, had a place for you…vamos.  If Richard III saw that “Now is the winter of our discontent…”, this was surely the Summer of our Despair.  Or, to quote Jim Lahey “the winds of shit” seemed to be swirling, and nobody has a jacket.