Editors Note – The original article can be found here if you’d like to read: http://www.carolinajournal.com/daily_journal/display.html?id=9808
John Hood’s article on unemployment in the Daily Dispatch (1/16/2013, page A8) would make the English philosopher John Locke (for whom Hood’s organization is named) absolutely mortified. I have studied Locke, and Hood fails to understand him and takes him out of context, which is what he also does with his cited references.
So that no reader thinks I am a slacker for what follows, I am an MIT graduate, with further graduate degrees. After the time period described in what follows, I eventually retired from the Air Force as a full Colonel and spent several years as a college professor. All of my children are college graduates.
My employer lost a contract and had a layoff about the time of my divorce. I was given custody of my two small children because of improper behavior on the part of my ex-wife. (For example, she had the children with her while shop-lifting as they watched.) However, there was a condition of my custody – I had to live in a particular area of about 5 square miles – a condition which would never be imposed on a mother but typical of the treatment of male parents.
When I could not get a job in my field unless I moved several hundred miles away without the children, I reduced my qualifications in my resume and tried for a lesser job. I was still “over-qualified.” I reduced my qualification still further – still “over-qualified.” Finally, as my unemployment ran out I took a menial job so low in income that I qualified for Food Stamps and Welfare. (My ex-wife, gainfully employed, crossed a State line and refused to pay the Child Support the Courts repeatedly ordered.)
On Food Stamps and Welfare and a menial job, I went to use the restroom at the local Welfare Office – there was no toilet paper. I reported this to the lady at the desk, who at once shouted loudly, “There shouldn’t be toilet paper in our restrooms or you B******s will steal it. If you are on Welfare, Unemployment, or Food Stamps, you OUGHT to have S****y A***s.” If she lived in North Carolina, that woman would have been in John Hood’s organization. It did not occur to her that if it were not for those social safety net programs, she would not have a job. It also has not occurred to John Hood that without those programs we would have a worse problem of starving children and the store owners in areas of unemployment would be out of business.
Where I lived, in order to collect Unemployment, I had to report all job interviews and meet a quota of them. John Hood has clearly never personally experienced unemployment or the other misfortunes on which he professes to be knowledgeable. I wish him the chance to live these problems so his next article will reflect personal experience.
He should be ashamed to publish his article. The Daily Dispatch should be ashamed of printing it.
Larry Elman