One of the hardest aspects of unemployment is dealing the lingering expectancy of prompt response to job inquiries and applications. I always come back to my email with the expectancy of response, that out of the 10 jobs I contacted last week or the six the week before or the forgotten number the week before that will reply to my resume/cover letter packet and offer the chance of an interview. But instead I'm left with an inbox full of junk mail and the latest sale at http://www.pricepoint.com/ and the nagging suggestion in the back of my mind that I'm being rejected...again.
Rejection is the feeling of being ignored, looked over, or failing to meet the qualifications. Rejection is looking for a job in a recovering economy where people are still making money, buying cars, building houses, creating industry, and going to war, but not hiring. It filters down like sifted flour and covers over life, everything I do has the flavor and texture of rejection because I am painfully conscious that everything I do now is because I can not find a job. Trying to fill the long days, while easy enough, is still dusted with the knowledge that tomorrow there is no work, nor the next day, nor the next and rent is paid and bills are paid by the grace of welfare (lets call it what it is) and rejection becomes a source of shame and frustration that infects the very core of being human.
Until you have lived this experience there are very few comparisons to be drawn, and, honestly, none that I can think of.
It is a pattern of ups and downs as I earnestly try to reinvent myself and my identity and cope with the struggles of poverty. Of all the consequences of poverty, in my opinion, the worst is the social feeling of shame. Standing in parks while the kids play, making small talk with other parents or friends at parties, the gross majority living a middle class life born out of hard work, discipline, and perseverance, will cast thoughtless judgement on the plight of the poor. Implying that the fault of the poor is on the shoulders of the poor and their eyes glaze over with a removed pity condemning them to the life they've "chosen".
The poor are not poor because that is the choice they've made. The poor are poor because they are poor.
Very few would choose this life.
But the social response to impoverished neighbors is to pile shame on their situation, albeit indirectly. Schools in low income neighborhoods are castigated as inferior and the result becomes an inferior school. The welfare they depend on is seen as something paid for by someone else (perhaps rightly so) in this regard it is always viewed as a hand out by those who don't need it and there for looked down on because someone else is "paying" the way. Society is framed with rags to riches stories of kings and queens of industry, art, and thought, clawing their way out of the holes into which they were born or cast by their boot straps and we are indoctrinated by the notion that hard work and sweat will see us into the American Dream, fenced in by white pickets, off street parking, two cars, an iPhone, and a blazing fast Internet connection. The fence is to keep people out and may as well be an erection of razor wire charged with electric currents and guarded like a prison because breaking into the American dream is like breaking out of a maximum security prison full of life sentences -- it can be done but no matter the work, sweat, and toil, unless their already there, most will never make it out.
This is my view from the depths of a recession, as my oldest son prepares for first grade in public schools, as unemployment insurance is paid each week and food stamps are filled each month. Rejected by the only profession I have (carpentry) and castigated--unintentionally--by the only society I know
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