Needing (Wanting) A Break
Bottom line is that we want things and we tend to want them cheap, everything from our gas to our labor; reports show that wages and employment are nearing record levels but the immigration bans may be showing us just how much immigrants both legal and illegal contributed to our low prices....labor. A report also in Bloomberg noted: Goldman Sachs economists estimate that nearly 60% of the expansion in the US labor force over the 2010-18 period came from foreign-born workers. It was a piece on the rising birthrate coupled with a decline in overall births (what??): US births are finally on the rise. For the first time since 2014, this crucial gauge of long-term growth --and stimulus for spending in the near and medium term-- is in the black. Births climbed by 1% last year, against an average annual drop of 2% over the preceding seven years...The bad news: The fertility rate remains well below that needed to keep the population stable. It increased to 1,663.5 births per 1,000 women, still well under the 2,100 needed to meet the replacement rate. Couple that with these additional numbers from the Pew Research Center: The teen birth rate in the United States is at a record low, dropping below 18 births per 1,000 girls and women ages 15 to 19 for the first time since the government began regularly collecting data on this group... Wait, 15-year olds?
Add to all of this the newest numbers out and this emerges, again from Bloomberg: ...the US has now recovered 95% of jobs lost during the first two months of the pandemic. And the unemployment rate is now within striking distance of matching the lowest level since 1969. The likely moderation of US job growth in coming months will reflect a combination of hiring challenges in a remarkably tight labor market. Some sectors, like travel and entertainment, are expected to make up a large share of aggregate growth as Americans allocate more discretionary income to services. “It’s less about filling the hole that was created from the pandemic and it’s more about finding this new equilibrium,” said Michelle Meyer, US chief economist at Mastercard Economics Institute. It’s “the right matching between where the jobs are and where the people are in terms of looking for those jobs.” Grocery shelves run out of items such as milk and eggs, while neighbors remodeling kitchens or yards wait six months of more...the stores and contractors say that they simply can't get the workers (did I mention that the average Amazon worker makes just over $32,000 a year but Amazon's CEO Andy Jassy makes $213,000,000, said Fortune). And yet I still see the highways packed with cars and Costco appears to be as busy as ever. But there's one additional quandry to this puzzle: The Conversation wrote about gun sales and stocks skyrocketing after all the recent and continued shootings of innocent children and civilians: First you have increasing demand for weapons. Research has shown that gun sales go up after a high-profile shooting as Americans “arm up,” both out of a perceived concern for their safety and fear of tighter restrictions. What the heck? Just trying to figure out what was going on in the world was growing frustrating or perhaps, futile.
Author Geoff Dyer wrote in his recent book on a picture of a dead migrant worker: This was a man who ran out of life-fuel, who couldn't take another step, or knew that even if he took one more he certainly couldn't take three or four or a hundred more, and unless he was able to take at least four or five thousand more there was no sense taking even one. And at that point, as he sat down for the last time, he must have felt as peaceful as Charis (the photographer) believed him to be. The only thing he wished was that he still had a hat to keep the sun from squinting in his eyes. Other than that, where he was was a good as anywhere he was ever going to get. Once you've come to that conclusion the only pillow you need is the hard earth itself. So he just lay there, the sun boring into his eyes, the sound of insects in his ears and the tickle of a fly on his face, until there was not even that, just the stubble on his chin that didn't have the sense to know it was beat. Dyer's book, The Last Days of Roger Federer, was on reaching a point where you realize, or at least begin to recognize, that things have diminished; maybe it's not the end but certainly things will be a bit more difficult from this point onward. Couple this with the rather sobering view of Foreverland* author, Heather Havrilesky who wrote an article in Esquire saying this: ...it's hard for a man not to hate himself when he begins to slow down and question his lifelong assumptions, particularly when everyone around him is hitting their stride. Sometimes women are tempted to shout, "Man up, dummy!"
Anyway, my wife and I decided that we needed to look at things differently, that if gas was a dollar more a gallon, then that meant each tank was an extra $20...the cost of getting us another 400 miles or so. Okay, make it two dollars more and you have an extra $40. Anyway, we were going to bite the bullet (so to speak) and plan a road trip (again). Of course, we realized that we would be far from alone in thinking this and that the flights and planes and places to stay would be rather full. More importantly, we realized that we were fortunate to even be considering such a trip. For some people, "getting away" would be but a dream, their physical bodies or conditions taking such thoughts out of the picture. Or they were struggling to just make ends meet. Or they were in prison...
The podcast and book, This Is Ear Hustle, left me wondering about prison, about how a desperate situation can backfire, that feeling that everything was collapsing around you and that one "gamble" would get out of where you were. Michelle was one such person serving 10 years for a white collar crime: We lost our house through my incarceration. I can't even drive by the street...when it comes to my home, my kids, my family --as I said-- it never completely heals...Ventura County Jail called me and said, "We're doing an orientation for new volunteers. Could you come and speak to them?" I wasn't sure what they meant, but they said they just wanted me to share my perspective. I agreed, went, and got up -- having never spoken publicly about my experience. I ended up breaking down in tears, admitting that I was still really struggling -- to the point where I didn't even want to f#%king live at that moment. Somehow, I got through the talk. Afterward, this woman came up to me. She wasn't hysterically crying, but was just sort of silently breaking down. She couldn't even get the words out, but her mouth was moving and I knew she was trying to say something. I signaled that I couldn't hear her, and she grabbed me, held my hands, and said, "Me too." I don't know what the words were before that, or what she said after. But I knew her pain, and she knew mine...That's an incarcerated family. It sucks. We get so much shit thrown at us, but there's also this spirit. We're fighters and warriors. So when you meet that incarcerated family, don't be quick to judge. You just might be surprised at what the hell they're going through.
Esquire profiled actor Jake Gyllenhaal who asked the reader: That begs for a deeper philosophical question. Not about any individual, per se, but a conversation that allows us to examine how we can --or should, even-- take responsibility for what we put into the world, our contributions into the world...We see that in politics. There's anger and divisiveness, and it's literally life-threatening in the extreme. My question is this: Is this our future? Is anger and divisiveness our future? Or can we be empowered and empower others while simultaneously putting empathy and civility into the dominant conversation?
My wife and I were growing weary of hearing such things, about oil spills and shootings, falling markets and rising prices, even if those realities were right outside our windows. But at the least we could pretend for a week that everything was better, that the doom and gloom we were hearing was being heightened and exaggerated by the media, that once out on the road we would see something entirely different (and indeed that did happen). It was time to tune it all out for a week and to re-charge our bodies and our thinking, to gaze at the endless miles ahead and see with our own eyes the rolling hills and the vast empty stretches. It was time to put on some old broadcasts of Lake Wobegon and Desert Island Discs and just hit the road. Said Garrison Keillor in the intro to one of his audio collections: The thought of people in this day and age sitting down to listen to a radio variety show on Saturday evening is rather implausible and was even more so in 1974 when we started "A Prairie Home Companion." Thank goodness Minnesota Public Radio was too poor to afford good advice or the show never would've got on the air. We only did it because we knew it would be fun to do. It was a dumb idea. I wish I knew how to be that dumb again.
Maybe my wife and I were indeed acting dumb and shirking our responsibilities, that we were pretending that all would be better when we returned. But we were under no such illusions...we just needed a break. So we loaded the car, got the dog in, and began what would turn out to be a 12-hour drive. Geoff Dyer wrote: I have less to lose, now that the brain has done the bulk of the work of which is was ever going to be capable. I expect to live beyond seventy but if we translate the old three-score-years and ten of life expectancy into days of the week then it's now early Sunday morning. Poet Louise Elisabeth Glück put it in a slightly different manner: I think here I will leave you. It has come to seem there is no perfect ending. Indeed, there are infinite endings. Or perhaps, once one begins, there are only endings. So the adventure began and five hours in and traveling at 80 mph far from any city, we ran over something in the roadway and got a flat. State troopers were at least 30 minutes away, any tow truck even further. It was a story for the ages. Hint: that tall tale will be in the next post...after a break.
*Havrilesky's book is more a lengthy Ask Polly therapy session, an online column she writes, and her open marriage has survived cancer, several kids, and a husband of 15 years (she remains married). She does add this at the end of her book: Every book about death is also a book about how to survive in the face of death -- which means that every book about marriage is actually a book about survival, and about trying to find happiness together in spite of the fact that you're doomed to fail from the start. Not exactly uplifting, is it? But that is the point of her book and earlier writings...accept yourself, flaws and all. Nothing is (or it would seem from her writing, will be) perfect...
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