By Kevin D. Williamson
Thursday, June 09, 2016
When I was a kid, I didn’t have any more appreciation for
those “We Had It So Hard” stories you get from your parents and your
grandparents than any other callow schoolboy does. But one of them stuck with
me.
The elderly, highly regarded gentleman in question had
moved to West Texas with his parents in the 1920s where they lived under what
were essentially pioneer conditions, hunting rabbits for meat and foraging what
other food they could, sometimes even eating green tumbleweeds. If you don’t
know what the wind is like in West Texas, it will sound absurd, but, at one
point, their house literally was blown away. There was no high school where
they were — the place was called Sand — but there was one in a town 15 miles
away, so he walked there and went to work at a filling station, a job he kept
through high school. He was later accepted as a student at Texas Tech, the
campus of which was a little more than 60 miles away. Again, he walked, not
knowing where or how he’d live when he got there. The only business he knew was
running a filling station, so he and another student started one, and he later
used some of the money he made to open a movie theater. What followed was a
successful business career and then a career in politics, culminating with his
election as Texas governor Preston Smith.
We Americans have always been in motion. The pilgrims in
their ships, the pioneers in their wagons, the Okies bound for California
however they could get there, Preston Smith and his much-used shoes. It isn’t
always great. But it isn’t all that bad, either, especially when you are young:
I am sure that many of you reading this have had the experience of moving into
an apartment you’ve never seen because you didn’t have the money to go scouting
when relocating for a new job. Sometimes it’s better than expected, sometimes
not –but it is always a surprise.
I am not among those who believe that poverty builds
character — I can do without that kind of character — but I do sometimes almost
feel sorry for those friends of mine who’ve always had it a little too good,
who don’t have any funny stories about roadside misadventures caused by having
a crappy 22-year-old car, the semester they spent semi-homeless, the people
they met working on a farm or doing day labor. I don’t want to have those kinds
of adventures now, and I didn’t want to have them at the time, either, but
sometime between then and now I became glad that they had happened.
And that is what is particularly despair-inducing about
the latest research on long-term unemployment from Express Employment
Professionals, a large international staffing agency. If you’ve been following
my reporting and arguments about the condition of the white underclass — and
the emotionally incontinent response to it from some quarters — none of this
will be exactly surprising. But lament in confirmation.
The largest age cohort in this study of long-term
unemployment turns out to be young people, those aged 18 to 29, who account for
33 percent of the jobless in this survey. A large majority — 61 percent — say
they are “not at all willing” to relocate for a job, while only 4 percent say they
already had done so. Some 17 percent of them have college degrees, and, among
those with degrees, more than half said they wished they’d done something else,
concentrating instead on vocational training rather than on graduating from
college. A large majority of them say that they would rather remain unemployed
than work for minimum wage, and half of them haven’t had a job interview since
2014. Given a choice between Hillary Rodham Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Donald
Trump, they are almost evenly split, with Mrs. Clinton enjoying a very slight
advantage.
Where will they go? Nowhere, apparently. What will they
do?
Houston has in recent months been hammered by low oil
prices, and for a quarter it was neck-and-neck with Philadelphia at the bottom
of the job-creation rankings. But there is work to be had, and some of it is
surprisingly attractive. A developer of multifamily housing seeks a
construction manager for a $125,000 salary and additional compensation. A
convenience store seeks a manager and offers benefits including medical,
dental, and vision insurance, a 401(k), a flexible-spending account, financial
assistance for parents adopting children, and tuition reimbursement. I’ve never
wanted to do anything other than what I do right now (I am very lucky that
way), but I don’t think that I’d feel ashamed to earn $125,000 a year in
construction, especially in a city where that kind of money goes a very long
way. That’s house-with-a-pool money. Las Vegas, Tulsa, Kansas City,
Tallahassee: Have a look at the help-wanted ads, and you might be surprised.
But that doesn’t do you any good if you aren’t willing to
go where the work is.
Paul Ryan has just introduced a welfare-reform proposal,
and it is a pretty good one. We already knew what was going to be in it — work
requirements and time limits for able-bodied adults — because there are only so
many meaningful avenues of reform. We also know what the Left’s response is
going to be: that this is cruel, callous, punitive, etc. But there are really
only two choices: Get people moving toward economic self-sufficiency or sustain
them forever in the soul-killing state of dependency. There isn’t a third
option. Not really.
This is only partly about money. We are a very, very rich
society, and we can afford to provide decently for people who cannot care for
themselves, including children and those who are physically or mentally
disabled. But that isn’t our problem: Our problem isn’t people who are
physically disabled but people who are morally disabled, people who wouldn’t
take a bus 15 minutes to work at a gas station, much less walk 15 miles to do
so. I met Preston Smith at the unveiling of a statue of him, in commemoration
of his work in public service. “I didn’t know this was how it was going to turn
out,” he said. If we could see the end of the path at the beginning, we might
set out with a little more resolve. But we can’t. And where we once had the
faith and the confidence to help carry us through the unknown, we now have an
overabundance of caution, an anchoring pessimism that fixes us in place like
bugs on pins.
That’s the strange reality of what has transpired in
these United States: We are so much richer than we were 50 years ago, but so
much poorer.
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