Reply #97: I used to think like TNDem ("No one needs to be poor") [View All]

until I came out of school into the Reagan recession, where Minneapolis had 11% reported unemployment, which means that the real rate was much higher.

I was signed up with three temporary agencies and got jobs usually 3 or 4 times a week. That was with me getting up at 6AM every day and calling the agencies to nag them.

I applied for regular jobs, like a sales job at a bookstore, eight hours a week, minimum wage. There were 200 applicants, including people with library science degrees.

I took any job the temp agencies offered: hospital laundry, grimy industrial work, assembly work, mindless data entry, whatever there was. I signed up for Christmas work at Penney's, but like everyone else, I was scheduled for no more than 20 hours a week and was terminated a week after Christmas. I made about $500 a month in a good month, $300 in a bad month. (That was 1982).

I got a part-time teaching job the following year and made $350 month during the school year, nothing in the summer. During the summer, I went back to the temp agencies.

I would have been homeless if my family hadn't helped me a lot.

In the summer of 1984 I finally got a full-time teaching job. But the three years--that's three years, TNDem--between leaving school and getting a real job were some of the most educational of my life.

If you think that people who are poor deserve it somehow, that's a defense mechanism. Deep down, you know you're on the edge, and by despising the poor, you convince yourself that you really have nothing in common with them and that it could never happen to you. Famous last words.