Survival guide for long-term unemployed folks

“Religious” Leaders Are Ignoring

Experienced Workers Hit By Recession

Sooner or later, it happens to each of us. There always will be at least one situation in our lives that we cannot fix, control, explain, change or even understand. Maybe you’ve been laid off from a job you held for years. Perhaps you’ve experienced a nasty divorce. Or maybe the crisis is more subtle: You suddenly realized that you’ll never have the life you dreamed of living. Any life-changing moment can knock a person down. But it can also open doors if a person learns how to “fall upward.”

Older Americans like myself face a problem: Religious leaders aren’t paying much attention to us. Much of contemporary religion is geared toward teaching people how to navigate the first half of their lives, when they’re building careers and families, a kind of “goal-oriented” spirituality. Yet there’s less help for people dealing with the challenges of aging: the loss of health, the death of friends, and coming to terms with mistakes that cannot be undone.

God can sometimes also function as a spiritual survival guide for hard times as millions of Americans young and old struggle to cope with “falling”: losing their homes, careers and status. The phrase “falling upward” describes a paradox. Nearly everybody will fall in life because they'll be confronted with some type of catastrophic loss or abject failure. Yet failure can lead to growth if a person makes the right decisions. I’ve met people who, because of the loss of things and security, have been able to find grace, freedom and new horizons.

If you’re falling in any area of your life, one of the first skills to learn is accepting surprises. It’s easy for people to turn bitter when things don’t go as planned. He sees such people all the time, whether throwing tantrums at the airport because of long lines or flocking to angry rallies in opposition to some form of social change. If you don’t know how to deal with exceptions, surprise and spontaneity by the time you’re my age, you become a predictable series of responses of paranoia, blame and defensiveness. These circumstances often teach similar lessons about hard times: [1] Suffering is necessary, [2] the “false self” must be abandoned, and [3] everything belongs, even the sad, absurd and futile parts. People have learned these hard lessons for centuries, sometimes through myth, but most of the time by trial and error. They must first experience humiliation, loss and suffering before finding enlightenment. They are often forced on their journey by a crisis.

Events like the evaporation of a retirement fund or the death of a spouse can force you to summon strength you didn’t know you had. Forced liquidations of businesses that were once thriving enterprises is another example that comes to mind. The key is not resisting the crisis. Allow the circumstances of God and life to break you out of your egocentric responses to everything. If you allow ‘the other’ -- other people, other events, other religions or cultures -- to influence you, you just keep growing. That growth, though, is accompanied by death -- the death of the “false self,” The false self is the part of your self tied to your achievements and possessions. When your false self dies, you start learning how to base your happiness on more eternal sources. You start drawing from your walk with Christ. You learn to distinguish from the essential self and the self that’s only window dressing.

Those who break through the crisis and lose their false selves become different people: Less judgmental, more generous and better able to ignore evil, selfish or stupid deeds of others. It may sound esoteric, but many of us have met older people like this. They possess what I call “a bright sadness”: they’ve suffered but they still smile and give. I’ve seen that in the wonderful older people in my life. There’s a kind of gravitas they have. There’s an easy smile on their faces. These are the people who laugh, who heal, who build bridges, who don’t turn bitter. This “bright sadness” shouldn’t be confined to older people. I've met 11-year-old children in cancer wards who are in the second half of life, and I have met 68-year-old men like me who are still in the first half of life.

I challenge the notion that success is a natural result of being religious. Our culture is prone to imagine that growth takes place in a sort of constant, upward movement. Even our religious culture tends to focus on success and stability as ideals for religious growth, while overlooking the grace of failure, from which far more growth originates. In the Christian tradition, loss, collapse and failure have always been seen as not only unavoidable, but even necessary on the path to wisdom, freedom and personal maturity. I know older people like myself, all of whom have vast work experience, who struggled to rebuild their identities after they poured much of their earlier lives’ energies into professional and personal success. That is what happened to me after 2008, when I found myself forced out of IT after an 18-month absence due to several health issues.

Our culture tends to be youth-oriented, and a lot of spirituality is youth oriented. But our elders are the embodiment of the wisdom that life matters at a much deeper level than what we can achieve and produce. Imperfect people are sometimes more equipped than perfect people to help those who are struggling. The person who never makes a mistake and always manages to obey the rules is often a person devoid of compassion. He or she sees people for whom the wheels have fallen off and they wonder 'what’s wrong with them'. But the person who feels that he or she has ruined their life often has more capacity for humility and compassion. I’m embarrassed as I’m getting older about how much of my energy and vitality as a younger man was driven by ego and a win-lose mentality.

As I've gotten older I find myself driven by something altogether different: The need for rest, and a need for more time for contemplation. As a teacher once told me, “The first half of life, you write the text,” he said. “The second half of your life is when you write the commentary. You have to process what it all meant.” I will be challenged to follow his and my own advice. I will spend less energy on my “false self” as his old identity dissolves. It will be a relief to me when the process is over. I am ready, though, to fall upward. If I lose my position as a web minister, author and respected church member, I would still feel secure. Most of us don’t learn this until it is taken away, like losing the security of your 401K as your entire career evaporates before your eyes. Then the learning either starts or you circle the wagons.

Shouldn't There Be a Protest Against Bad People?

Should The Greater Christian Churches Go On Strike?

Osama bin Laden has been dead for about 2 years by now. Meanwhile, ever greater numbers of our senior citizens are living into their 100's. There's life and death, positive and negative, good and bad in all kinds of folks. One priest saves lepers, another abuses altar boys; one Nazi runs the ovens, another hides Jews. And when we marvel at those contradictions we have a ready explanation. There's good and bad everywhere, in all races, nations, societies. We have yet to bridge our differences in race or culture or nationality or faith, but at least we can all agree on that simple truth while we continue to work on all the others.

We live in a futuristic time of instant communication, jumbo jets, TV, Facebook and Twitter. Nations are beginning to blur; races, ethnicities and various nationalities are mixing, our globe has shrunk to an overheated marble, yet the world seems more fractured than ever. So much divides us. What unites us? Religion? It could, but having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ unites us all under his holy banner, meaning that Christ, as usual, is and has the answer. The maximum number of plausible Gods is one. Yet we've been waging wars for millennia over what to call him and whether he likes his picture painted. But while religions can't agree on God, they're remarkably close on people. There is near universal agreement on what makes a good one.

Be kind to people, treat your neighbors well, be hospitable to strangers, love one another, live honestly, and a dozen other virtues seem to comprise some universal truth about humanity. And all societies agree on them. It's as plain as daytime in the Bible. Mankind has been speaking those words since the first philosopher carved cuneiform into clay.

We must have an instinctive sense of goodness born into us. We also agree on what makes a bad person: The grasping, the cheat, the bully, the taker, the liar. I'm going to take the liberty of crowning myself one of the good people and assume I'm speaking to other good people. We know who we are. We don't like to hurt people. We try not to cheat, lie and steal and we're ashamed of ourselves when life drives us to those ends. We believe in peace on earth and goodwill towards men. And for ten thousand years we've let the bad people push us around and tell us what to do and to whom to do it. We've let them because they were bad enough to make us and we were too soft to stop them until they did terrible damage.

Bad people are very hard to ignore. You can't avoid a bad person if he or she happens to be your boss at work. And that happens a lot, because bad people seem disproportionately to occupy corner offices. They know how to play the cold-hearted game of office politics. That can be rough on you if you work with them. But bad people also know how to play the high-stakes game of real politics, and that's rough on everybody. Bad people hate, and they convince ordinary good people to hate the same things. Oh sure, there are always a few saints who rise above the evil that bad people do, and they usually die for it. We know about them posthumously from books about the Holocaust.

But those aren't good people, they're great people, and we can't count on them because they don't come along every day. But there are always plain old good people around, because there's good and bad in all kinds. And so this is a call to arms for good people everywhere. We have to stop following the bad people immediately. Without us, bad people have little power, they're merely annoying.

Good people everywhere, I'm speaking to you. We need to go on strike against the bad people. Let's tell the bullies and haters to leave us alone, because we don't want to have to kill any more of them. Let's laugh at their conspiracies, reject their twisted theories and refuse to be provoked by their aggression. Let's tell them we won't play their deadly games anymore; let's tell them it's over. Maybe we can give them an island where they can fight it out to their black hearts' content. But you know, it would apply even there, on the island of the damned. Some evil SOB would do something nice for some other evil SOB. Because there's good and bad in all kinds.

Gun Control Is Good, But Self Control Is Even Better

Empathy and Compassion in 21^st Century America

In a memorial service held last month in Tucson, Arizona for the victims of the 2012 mass shooting that took place there, President Obama called on Americans to "sharpen our instincts for empathy" so that we can become a more civil people. The President's call for a more empathic culture and civil society raises these troubling questions: What has gone so terribly wrong with America? Why are we becoming more aggressive, violent, self-interested and intolerant as a society? The problem goes far deeper than just blaming the escalating rhetoric of political pundits and talk show hosts, or of vilifying the so-called “gun culture”. Like it or not, we are a country governed by the rule of law, and the Second Amendment is part of that law, which is the Constitution of the United States. Instead, it has been my observation that they are playing off a deeper sensibility – or fear – that has become engrained in the thinking of many Americans.

It is our core beliefs about the very nature of human beings that make us so susceptible to the rising plague of hate and mistrust, even to the point of paranoia, and of the intolerance and unfocused rage that is spreading across the land. The current manhunt in California for an apparently berserk ex-cop is only the latest example. The American character was forged, in large part, on a skewed idea about who we are as a people that was spawned hundreds of years ago in the Protestant Reformation. From the very moment John Winthrop and his flock of Puritans landed on American shores in 1630, we came to believe that we are God's chosen people, when in fact the Bible states clearly and repeatedly that it is the nation of Israel that is God's chosen people. For Scripture that backs this up irrefutably, please see Deuteronomy chapter 34, verses 1-4 (“Then Moses climbed Mount Nebo from the plains of Moab to the top of Pisgah, across from Jericho. There the Lord showed him the whole land – from Gilead to Dan, all of Naphtali, the territory of Ephraim and Manasseh, all the land of Judah as far as the western sea, the Negev and the whole region from the valley of Jericho, the city of palms, as far as Zoar. Then the Lord said to him, 'This is the land I promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob when I will give it to your descendants'”, and Joshua chapter one, verses 2-5 (“Moses my servant is dead. Now then, you and all these people get ready to cross the Jordan River into the land I am about to give to them – to the Israelites. I will give you every place that you set your foot, as I promised Moses. Your territory will extend from the desert in Lebanon, and from the great river, the Euphrates – all the Hittite country – to the Great Sea on the west. No one will be able to stand up against you all the days of your life. As I was with Moses, so I will be with you; I will never leave you nor forsake you.”) For the most detailed explanation found in the Bible, see Joshua chapters 13-20, which is the root cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict that simmers to this day.

The ideology that God has a unique covenant with America that makes us special among the peoples of the world is a load of bull. We have become the fiercest supporters of the erroneous belief that the naked pursuit of individual self-interest in the market – the pursuit of profit based on greed – is the defining feature of human nature. We have by extension become believers in "American Exceptionalism," that our political ideology and our capitalist economic system are somehow superior to all others. This political hubris was the basis for the Cold War of the late 1940's to the late 1980's. In our social life, we are the strongest supporters of Social Darwinism, that life is a combative struggle in which only the strongest survive. These highly regarded core “beliefs” are antithetical to a mature empathic sensibility, an antidote to compassion, and they are mean-spirited and selfish to say the least.

It's no wonder, then, that when President Obama spoke of empathy during his first year in office, and again at the memorial service in Tucson, mentioning that it is the guiding philosophical principle in his life, he was pummeled and excoriated in the main-stream press as being weak and unfit to be the "Commander-in-Chief" of the most powerful nation on Earth. The question that is bothering me here is: What is there about the interrelated concepts of empathy and compassion that conjures up so much derision? Why does this seem to frighten so many people? Perhaps it's because being empathic and/or compassionate requires giving up the pretense of being special and anointed, as being “God's chosen people”, which is tantamount to being usurpers of God's holy covenant as stated in the above passages of Scripture. It means being mindful of other points of view, which requires the maintenance of an open mind, not to mention tolerance of those who are different from ourselves. It also means abandoning the idea that narcissistic self-interest is the only thing that matters. And, most important, it means being sympathetic to the plight of others and being sensitive to their needs. That's what Jesus meant when he said, “Whatsoever you do for the least of my brethren, that you do for me”.

New discoveries in human evolutionary development that encompass mankind's anthropology as well as advances in psychiatry and psychology are challenging our long held shibboleths about human nature. We are learning that human beings are biologically predisposed – not for aggression, violence, self-interest and pleasure-seeking utilitarian behavior – but rather for intimacy and sociability, and that empathy and compassion are the emotional and cognitive means by which we express these drives. To empathize is to experience the condition of others as if it was our own. It is to recognize their vulnerabilities and their struggle to flourish and to become something more than what they are. To express compassion with others requires that we first acknowledge our own vulnerabilities and to confront our own feelings of insecurity. It is because we realize that life is fraught with challenges, that we are all imperfect, fragile and vulnerable, that life is precious and worthy of being treated with respect, that we are then able to reach out and, through our empathic regard, express our solidarity with our fellow beings. Empathy is how we celebrate each other's existence. To empathize is to civilize, and to have and practice compassion is what sums up the two greatest commandments of Christ (“Love the Lord your God with all your strength, with all your might, with all your heart and with all your spirit. And the second command is like the first: Love your neighbor as yourself”).

Empathy is the real "invisible hand" of history. It is the social glue that has allowed our species to express solidarity with each other over ever broader domains. The advent of the internet in the last 20 years, and more recently social media, has increased this phenomenon exponentially. Empathy has evolved over history. In forager-hunter societies, empathy rarely went beyond tribal blood ties. In the great agricultural age, empathy extended past blood ties to associational ties based on religious or racial identification. Jews began to empathize with fellow Jews as if in an extended family, Christians began empathizing with fellow Christians, Muslims with Muslims, and so on. In the Industrial Age, with the emergence of the modern nation-state, empathy extended once again, this time to people of like-minded national identities. Americans began to empathize with Americans, Germans with Germans, Japanese with Japanese. Today empathy is beginning to stretch beyond national boundaries to include the whole of humanity. We are coming to see the biosphere as our indivisible community, and our fellow human beings and creatures as our extended evolutionary family.

This doesn't mean that our national loyalties, religious beliefs and blood affiliations are not important to us any more. But when they become a litmus test for defining the human sojourn, all other beliefs become the “alien other”. For a long time, we Americans have been obsessed with "creating a more perfect union." Maybe it is time to put equal or greater weight on creating a more empathic and compassionate society. The hard economic times that have been ongoing since the economic implosion of 2008 up to the present serve to add even more emphasis to this timeless truth. We have the stark choice of either upholding each other for the mutual benefit of all, or facing mutually assured self-destruction. It's all up to us.

Criminalizing Poverrty Goes Into Overdrive

Criminalizing Poverty: During Today's Economic Crisis,
New Laws Crack Down on America's Poor and Homeless


    The number of laws criminalizing poverty is increasing as the housing and homelessness crises in America has worsened. Since 2006, there's been a 12 percent increase in laws prohibiting camping out in public places, a 14 percent increase in laws prohibiting loitering, a 9 percent increase in laws prohibiting begging and a 8 percent increase in laws prohibiting aggressive panhandling, according to a recent report by The National Coalition for the Homeless. At the same time, after a double-digit jump in 2008, homelessness increased by an average of 6 percent from 2009 to 2010, and an additional 7% increase from 2010 to 2012, according to the U.S. Conference of Mayors' Task Force on Hunger and Homelessness. Among families with children, homelessness increased by 14 percent. An average of 33 percent of homeless persons did not receive assistance last year because there weren't enough beds or because shelters would not accept children.


    In today's economy, cities are facing really tight budgets, so they are often unable to build up or fund housing to meet the need. Many people are being forced to live out on the streets. In an essay published last year in The Guardian, Barbara Ehrenreich, author of the New York Times bestselling book "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America," tells the story of a 62-year-old disabled veteran who was dragged from a homeless shelter to jail because he had an outstanding warrant for "criminal trespassing," which is how Washington, D.C., defines sleeping on the streets. In some areas of the country, cities are even beginning to crack down on well-meaning individuals who want to hand out free food to the homeless. Las Vegas passed an ordinance forbidding the sharing of food with any "person whom a reasonable ordinary person would believe to be entitled to apply for or receive" public assistance. In Florida, Gainesville law limits the number of people soup kitchens may serve daily. In Phoenix, zoning officials actually stopped a local church from serving breakfast to homeless people.


    The phenomenon of criminalizing poverty isn't limited to the homeless, though. Speaking from experience – having been homeless myself up until 3 years ago – I would compare applying for welfare and food benefits, which often entails mug shots, fingerprinting and lengthy interrogations about child paternity, to being booked by the police. In Florida, legislators recently passed a law requiring welfare recipients to undergo drug screenings, according to CNN. In response to criticism from the ACLU over his decision to approve drug testing for welfare beneficiaries, former Florida Gov. Rick Scott told CNN the law encourages "personal accountability." People who can't afford to pay court fees or traffic tickets in Michigan are made to sit in jail. Pay-or-stay sentences are no choice for the poor. They translate to rich people writing a check and going home and poor people going to jail. It's a modern-day debtor's prison. This two-tiered system of justice is shameful, it's a waste of resources, it is unconstitutional, it is a gross violation of human rights and civil rights, and it urgently needs be changed.


    As governments have cut funds to social welfare programs and passed laws that discriminate against the poor, the experience of America's poor has come to resemble that of a rat in a cage scrambling to avoid erratically administered electric shocks. Officials argue, though, that making it illegal to sleep, sit or store personal belongings in public spaces is not discriminatory, according to USA Today. "If you're lying on a sidewalk, whether you're homeless or a millionaire, you're in violation of the ordinance," said Joseph Patner, a city attorney who represented St. Petersburg, Fla, in 2009 when six homeless people filed a lawsuit against the city. "It's not right for taxpayer money to be paying for somebody's drug addiction," he said. "On top of that, this is going to increase personal responsibility, personal accountability. We shouldn't be subsidizing people's addiction."


    Here in Atlanta where I live, it's just as bad if not worse. In the inner city neighborhood just west of downtown where I live and work, anywhere from one-third to one-half of the single-family homes are abandoned and/or boarded up. At least 10 to 20 percent of these neglected homes are in such bad shape that a bulldozer is the only correct solution. But the majority of the other ones, though they are older dwellings,  could be rehabilitated and lived in once again. But, since they are in an admittedly high-crime area, nobody wants them even though they are located only 5-10 minutes away from the mostly-revitalized downtown area. But since they are largely unwanted, many of these abandoned homes are inhabited by squatters who would otherwise be sleeping out in the weather. But as I wrote above, when the city of Atlanta police find people in these dwellings, they are immediately arrested for “criminal trespassing” and hauled off to jail. Few if any of these unlucky persons can bail themselves out of jail, so they languish behind bars until their court date, which can be anywhere from several weeks to more than 2 months. The fact that it costs the city an average of $65.00 per day to incarcerate these otherwise harmless individuals doesn't matter to the entrenched powers down at Atlanta City Hall.


    To make matters worse, if there are children involved, they are forcibly taken away from their parents and placed in foster homes at best, or even juvenile detention at worst. This perpetuates the cycle of homelessness and poverty while creating new caseloads for social workers, therapists, psychiatrists and probation officers, among others. In so doing, the seeds of rage, addiction and abuse are planted within these impressionable young minds until they wind up being institutionalized as teens or adults, one way or the other. And all this continues to occur because certain wealthy and influential property owners would rather board up these abandoned houses that (allegedly) nobody wants, rather than sell them at a hefty discount for less profit. It is these wealthy and incredibly greedy property owners who should be in jail, not the homeless squatters who have no where else to go.


    Is there a solution that we can afford as conscientious Americans? You can bet your bottom dollar there is! I explained it the following way in my 2011 nonfiction book, “The Middle and Working Class Manifesto”. If the US government took all the money it spends in just one day on the occupation of Afghanistan and its clandestine presence in Iraq, Somalia, Yemen and Pakistan – among other places such as Western Europe – and invested those funds in an interest-bearing account at a bank, credit union or money market fund, there would be enough money to build a new 2,500 square foot house for every homeless person and/or family currently in America, fully furnished and with a year's supply of groceries for a family of four. That's right, everyone, just one day's needless and pointless military expenditures would pay for all that. In closing, then, the fairness, compassion and equity of developed countries and their so-called “societies” can best be judged by how well they treat their least fortunate citizens. In that regard, I would say America has got a lot of work to do.