NYTimes is shocked, SHOCKED!

The NYTimes is shocked that women over 50 have THE highest unemployment rate after people who are about to retire than any other demographic group in the country since the Great Recession started.

I know, shocking.

Unless you have had to live through it.

I wondered many times what exactly the country expects you to live on when you have submitted hundreds of cover letters and resumes without a nibble, gone through all of your savings, can’t get any more unemployment, etc. I mean, what is it you’re supposed to do when you’re way too young for social security, can’t get your pension, pay a fricking *surtax* on 401K withdrawals that you need to take in order to pay bills and buy basic necessities. Honestly, if that’s not immoral and wrong, I don’t know what is. What is it the right wing crazies want you to do when you can’t get an interview for that dishwasher’s job and you’re too old to sell your body?*

Take your time, I’ll wait.

Then again, I have to wonder if the NYTimes has considered its own culpability in the plight of unemployed women in their 50’s trying to, you know, maintain their caloric intake and shelter requirements (damn them, why won’t they just stay on their ice floes??).

When the Great Recession was in full swing, it was the NYTimes that ran a series of articles about unemployed people who had exhausted their benefits. Usually, the women they featured in pictures in these articles were in their 50s, were obese and sometimes asleep at their monitors. Never mind that none of the highly skilled, physically fit, unemployed people in NJ that I knew looked or behaved like that. This is the image that the NYTimes sent out to the world. Women in their 50s are morbidly overweight, unkempt, have brassy blonde hair and dark roots, they spend money foolishly on vacations, and lounge at their desks. That is the mental image that employers all have in their minds now.

Thank you, NYTimes.

Please stop trying to help.

By the way, it would be really nice if the world stopped assuming that people in their 50s can’t keep up with technology. The internet has been publicly available for about 25 years. That would have made women in their 50s young whippersnappers back then. They wrote the first web pages, learned the first versions of MS Office and did a bajillion other things with early smart phones, laptops and other gadgets. We’re as competent as our male counterparts. A penis does not make you more technologically savvy.

*I finally got a job but it was through a backdoor. If you’re over 50, just forget trying to get past the “Talent Acquisition Specialists”. They seem determined to keep you out and they use every trick in the book to figure out how old you are. Not that age really matters. Because it don’t.

Nick Kristof is shocked, SHOCKED!

Nicholas Kristof  writes in The Compassion Gap about the nasty responses he got from a lot of his readers to the plight of a woman he profiled recently.  Says Kristoff:

SOME readers collectively hissed after I wrote a week ago about the need for early-childhood interventions to broaden opportunity in America. I focused on a 3-year-old boy in West Virginia named Johnny Weethee whose hearing impairment had gone undetected, leading him to suffer speech and development problems that may dog him for the rest of his life.

A photo of Johnny and his mom, Truffles Weethee, accompanied the column and readers honed in on Truffles’ tattoos and weight.

“You show a photograph of a fat woman with tons of tattoos all over that she paid for,” one caller said. “And then we — boohoo — have to worry about the fact that her children aren’t cared for properly?”

On Twitter, Amy was more polite: “My heart breaks for Johnny. I have to wonder if the $$ mom spent on tattoos could have been put to better use.”

“This is typical of the left,” Pancho scolded on my Facebook page. “It’s not anyone’s fault. Responsibility is somebody else’s problem.”

To me, such outrage at a doting mom based on her appearance suggests the myopic tendency in our country to blame poverty on the poor, to confuse economic difficulties with moral failures, to muddle financial lapses with ethical ones.

Apparently, Nick Kristoff doesn’t read his own paper.  A few years ago, I noticed something extremely unsettling about the way the NYTimes was portraying the unemployed.  There were a number of articles for the front page that made the unemployed look like trailer trash, slovenly and asleep at their computers.  I don’t know what message that was supposed to send but it didn’t match ANY of the unemployed I knew, who consisted of R&D professionals with multiple degrees, publications and patents to their name.  There were hundreds of thousands of those people who certainly deserved compassion who didn’t get it.  And now those same hard working professionals have a very hard time finding jobs because for some reason, employers have this image in their heads that they’re obese, lazy, slovenly and depressing to be around.

Get your head out of your ass, Nick, and you will see that you are sitting in the middle of the source of the lack of compassion. The NY Times is a world leader when it comes to inducing stereotypical and harsh Pavlovian responses to people who have fallen from middle class grace.