Individual Liberty — Individual Responsibility 

It’s a nice place to visit but...

About ten months ago I lost a job that I had held for several years. I hadn’t really enjoyed working where I was for most of two years before that, but being unemployed made a change in my life that I didn’t really like. Shortly after I left, my former boss lost his job. Other people working for the same company started losing theirs too.

Getting a new job took me close to eight months, the longest time I had been without work in my adult life. I sent out thousands of copies of my resumé and got very few hits. I became a member of more than a couple of job search sites. I talked to my network of former coworkers. In all that time I ended up interviewing for maybe four jobs.

The first one was just a month or so after I re-entered the labor market. I ended up spending about three months talking to those people. I went to multiple interviews with them. They brought people across the country to talk to me. Near the end of the process things were looking pretty good – and their funding dried up. I never heard from them again. It was also near the end of that particular process that I ended up talking to two other potential employers.

One would have required me to move across the country – and I was actually looking forward to it. Betty and I have wanted to move to the East coast for a while now. Still, that job didn’t pan out either. Ultimately the company I would have ended up working for simply expanded the territory of one of their existing consultants. At least they let me know what had happened.

The other was a very short term thing – possibly producing a prototype of a new software product. Unfortunately the man that had that project had funding problems as well. He had a great idea for a product. Hard economic times just didn’t allow him to develop it.

And then I started talking to some people in Utah. Interview after interview – phone call after phone call. Something clicked with them and with me, and they decided they wanted me on their team. Then the real work started. Background checks, drug screening, information disclosure forms. It took weeks. Worst of all, I was afraid that something would turn up and they would decide that I wasn’t really suitable for the job.

No, I wasn’t worried about a positive drug test. No, I never lied in any of my applications or anything like that. But my prospective employer was a big banking firm and they had a tougher screening process than I went through getting a government security clearance for my first real job, and I have led a less than exemplary life from time to time – including … well we’ll not go there OK?

Still, the day came and the job turned out to not only be real, but it was mine. The only hitch was I’d have to relocate to Utah for the duration of the contract – about a year. My younger son was finally doing better in school – and liking it. Betty and I decided that there was just no way we could uproot him for us all to move out to Utah. And so here I am in a small studio apartment/hotel room for the next year while my wife is back home in Washington.

Utah has some lovely scenery. It has seasons. It has work (and it’s a really nice job too). But it doesn’t have my wife and family. Oh, I have aunts and uncles and cousins here, but that’s not quite the same. I’ve got a web camera and so does my wife (gifts from my mother this past Christmas), so I can see her from time to time, but it’s still not the same.

Fortunately I’ll be able to return home occasionally. I’ll be home for a couple of weeks at the end of next month (but I’ll still have to work remotely, and attend my meetings by telephone – at six-thirty in the morning for the first meeting). That’ll be much better I think, actually seeing my wife in person and spending evenings with her instead of alone.

The way I understand it, the unemployment rate has been hovering around 10% for most of a year. The rate of people that don’t have work but have given up looking is even higher – hovering around 17% to almost 20% and has been that way for a while too. I’m grateful to have a job – even if it does take me away from my family for a while.

But I really pray that the people in this country wake up to the cold hard facts and dump these tax-and-spend politicians that have sapped the heart of our economic prospects in the name of bigger government and “things that are too big to fail”. The only sector of our economy that seems to really be growing is government. There seem to be plenty of jobs there – paid for at the expense of private sector jobs.

The stimulus plan needs to be scrapped. The unspent money needs to be used to pay down the national debt, and we’ve got to stop spending money hand over fist. The idea of punishing success through punitive taxation has to be scrapped too. You’d think by now that we’ve had a fabulous demonstration of how poorly it works at resolving our unemployment problems. At the same time, we’ve got to stop rewarding failure through “tax credits”and “bailouts”.

Everyone knows how to train animals. You reward them when they do what you want and you punish them (gently) when they do what you don’t want them to do. Either the statists in our government want the economy to fail or they’re simply to stupid to understand the principle of reward and punishment. The people need to learn too that we can’t keep rewarding Senators, Representatives, and Presidents that continue to fail us by re-electing them.

Please wake up this election cycle people. Utah is a great place to visit but… well, you get the picture. Still…

… I’ll do what I have to for my family.