50 Is the New 65: Older Americans Are Getting Booted from Their Jobs -- and Denied New Opportunities

[jtuck004]

171. " If you can drive a truck you can find work" < You missed a few lines...

And he, or she, didn't write that as an op - it came in response to an article which detailed the fact that millions of people are now unemployed, and perhaps the only common thing they share is their age.

Given the new statistics which show suicides among that age group have risen for the first time, having now increased to beat out auto accidents as a cause of death, perhaps because depression has replaced hope, to glibly say if they would just go hop in the cab of a Kenworth their trouble would be over is far from just explaining what someone did when they found themselves out of a job.

What fucking good will it do the woman who the story was about, or the millions like her? And even if she could drive, the truck driving schools say there are hundreds of thousands of openings, yet Werner, one of the largest, recently had 100 openings, or .0003% of the need, presuming everyone in the group can do that. But they can't. To suggest that such a solution is more than it is minimizes the plight of everyone.

One might also point out, also falsely, that if you can say "Do you want fries with that" you can find work too. Not enough of even those jobs, and that completely ignores the fact that even with such a job those people may not be able to feed their children adequately, may go bankrupt, and that this works to the advantage of thieving corporations who want to take advantage of people.

The idea that there are jobs out there if people would just go get them, given that we have 26 million people unemployed and a JOLTS survey that says there are only 3.6 million jobs available seems to indicate such remarks are nothing more than a re-write of Reagan's mythical "welfare cadillac" story.

They are the jobs that will make our nation weaker, our people powerless, and would add to the between 50 and 100 million people here who already live in or near poverty, or must have assistance simply for food, in a country that throws away so much we have to bring trucks in to get rid of it.

Such answers are not only false, they are tasteless, and perhaps more than a little cruel.