Hundreds of signs crowded the National Mall in Washington D.C. this Saturday spreading the message that Americans need jobs, good jobs, for the One Nation march sponsored by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Federation of Labor – Confederation of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO). The doomed mission for the day was to send a message to the policy makers that we were hurting and we really needed them to focus on jobs.
The politicians have been hitting on jobs on every media outlet for months now. It is, as the kids say, a hot item in today’s media. The facts are in. We’re out of work.
These are days when there is a demographic known as the 99ers composed of people whose unemployment ran out after 99 weeks and they are no longer counted in unemployment statistics. Then there are people like me who haven’t held a job long enough to collect unemployment for years. Of course this doesn’t count the non-citizens and those poor souls who are employed by the military who will find that there is no civilian equivalent for the positions that they formerly held.
I’d just left the anti-war movements tiny little feeder rally a few hundred yards away in another field. The scene was all too familiar: A handful of seventies and eighties era protesters gathered happily around a stage while people took turns announcing the desperate need for the wars to end because it was wasting billions of dollars that could have been used to save us from the crushing reality of debt and poverty. Blah blah blah. We’d all heard it before. This wasn’t new information to anyone out here. This was the activists open mic.
Nobody gives a fuck about these wars anymore. People don’t have time to dream about a world without them. They are too busy wringing their hands either praying that the ax doesn’t drop on them or trying to pick up the pieces after it does.
I walked away sleepily towards the reflecting pool where the real speeches were scheduled to occur. I was growing more and more bitter about my lowly status as a very poor, very homeless young veteran. The word JOBS haunted me virulently, forcing me to break out in a cold sweat.
I had become a casualty of the recession. My resume sat unopened in email boxes around the nation. There were rumors that employers were reporting that for every posted job opening they would receive hundreds of applicants. These aren’t specialty jobs we’re talking about here. These are service jobs as cashiers and restaurant hosts. People didn’t care about what kind of work. They just wanted a job.
I was just crossing my fingers and humming the mantra of the professionally desperate: Everything is going to be ok…
JOBS!JOBS!JOBS!
A preacher man was speaking all wild about how God was going to pull us through, then he handed the mic off to some kids who called everyone to attention for the Pledge of Allegiance. I swelled with pride when I realized that I no longer remembered the lyrics. Deconstruction complete. I had to stumble for the words while dodging the signs being carelessly waved about while people talked on their cell phones and milled around the porta potties that lined the entire length of the reflecting pool. “I pledge allegiance to the… flag? Really? Of the United States of America. One Nation under the power of an imaginary man who has been absentee for generations now. “Indivisible…” With the blacks over here and the whites over here and the Latinos selling ice cream from carts… “With libertization and justification for all…” no, that can’t be right. People seemed unambitious, pleased with the pleasant sunny day that blessed the whole protest. Maybe I was the only one who was paranoid.
While a woman murdered the National Anthem I watched slack looking cops were lazily hold assault rifles as they fixed curious eyes on me. I was sticking out some with my old Army jacket that I’ve put the Sharpie to and my big eyes darting every which way to try to take in the scene with what I can only imagine to be a most disappointed look on my face. Any authority worth their salt could tell from a mile away that I had drugs written all over me even though, at this time, I was clean.
The speakers were mostly fiery wizened black men who put the mean spin on their words, speaking with that dramatic southern diction put to work best by the Baptists. It was hard to hear what the speakers said because people were talking amongst themselves everywhere I could see but from what I heard I gathered that this wasn’t a protest, it was church in the park.
This march was unlike other marches in one major way: there were black people here. There were a LOT of black people here. The ashy and grey old activists were thoroughly outnumbered. It came as such a relief to finally attend one march that wasn’t just a bunch of white people standing around looking like they’ve had too much time on their hands. I’d been to so many rallies and protests and this was the first sign I’d seen of the two communities coming together in such large doses. More of this kind of thing would be necessary if a real movement were to occur, but, as an old meth-head told me once in a cafe in Kalamazoo at a very early hour: “People are just to barrierized. We gotta Debarrierize em.”
“We came here today because we need jobs!” Cheering. “Good jobs!” More Cheering. Yada Yada Obama. “We believe in America!” Crowd goes wild. “We believe in US!” the cheering is drowned out by a low flying plane. Are you listening Mr. Obama? I doubt it. What could you do if you were?
This is the hanging of Barrack Obama on his cross because people had mistaken him for Jesus. They expected him to save us but there was so little that could be done. The jobs had been sold off long ago. Trades have been dead for years. He took office with a tidal wave of underemployed and unemployed people knocking down the doors of DHS centers around the nation. There were so few real positions for people in an outsourced and mechanized U.S. of A. that people were reduced to accepting the unbecoming slaves of the service industry while waves of fresh faced new applicants with degrees show up in the job market every semester while the prior generation learns the reality that now-a-days jobs demand degrees, something that had not been a reality when they were in their twenties. They had walked right out of high school into work.
I met back up with my friends from the Iraq Veterans Against the War. Three of us broke off to have a “safety briefing” off in the distance near some trees in a sparsely populated area of the park. We got lost talking about Gobs, a word whose etymology began that day when, upon hearing the words God and Jobs so frequently, we coined a new word. Gobs. Noun. Godly Jobs. Verb. To do a good Gob.
We were walking back with a few bad cases of the chuckles. One of us stopped to take a picture. I looked to see what had caught her eye and I saw that there were five cops in dress gear standing at an ice cream cone. I was touched by a moment that I thought to be very ironic, but J.Hurd, a veteran with beardly wisdom, pointed out to me that those cops were not buying ice cream, they were hassling this poor man for his papers. Five cops to hassle one ice cream cart guy not one mile from the location where millions of Americans are hustled out of billions of dollars every day by people much shadier than this pour sap. Apparently they just wanted to make a point that they had jobs.
Later that day a man came by our table. He was an older black guy with a grisly face. He had two wire hangers with small pieces of tape on them. He passed these over all of our materials while shaking his head. I didn’t have the heart to ask him what he was doing. I envied him. At least he had a clear shot at a disability claim. Later, when I told J.Hurd about him he informed me that he’d also seen this man and he had actually had the nerve to ask him what was up with the hangers. He told me that the guy just pointed at the sun and said “WHATS THAT?!” so J.Hurd goes “Its the Sun, man.” Then the guy repeats “Yeah, but what’s THAT, MAN?! That’s the sun and these just two wire hangers with some tape, man.” Then the old man just walked off he recollected.
There were more crazies here than usual. The table would clog up for dozens of minutes at a time as they poked and prodded us for answers about our experiences. “Have you ever killed anybody?” “Did you see any torture there?” “Boy, I bet that really fucked you up!” “What’s Guantanamo Bay?” I was short and kind of mean. I don’t like tabling. I don’t like talking to people. I don’t like people all that much either. I mean, they’re alright, but I’ve had my fill. Please just give me good friends and let me rattle off to do my Gob.
The march would have made more of a point if it had been scheduled on a weekday. The message would be painfully obvious. It would read:
Dear Government Officials,
We came down here on a Wednesday because we had nothing better to do. We don’t have to go to work so most of the time we just sit around worrying about things. Please create more work for us so that we don’t spend our days littering in the park.
Love,
The Unemployed Masses
As the people cleared away looking stoned from a day in the sun with little to no access to drinkable water the last irony of a day spent engaged in utter futility manifested itself as a carpet of printed material as far as the eye could see. Signs, handouts, socialist newspapers, pamphlets advising better lives. JOBS!JOBS!JOBS! I laughed to myself to think about the people who would have to do the job of cleaning all this shit up. Would they be happy that they were employed and that we had ensured their jobs for another day or would they be angry that a group of people came together for the glorious purpose of wasting hundreds of pounds of paper and plastic only to be ignored by the powers that be.
Why don’t you go get a Gob you fucking hippies.
The Paper Trail 