As Unemployment Grows

Freddie DeBoer ponders the "right to work":

...when people want to work, and can't get it, it's more than just an economic or political problem. It's a derailment of the vehicle of American aspiration. It's important for those who have been fortunate enough to never face a period of long unemployment to understand how degrading, emasculating and dehumanizing it can be.

For many of us, work is fundamentally bound up in our self-image and self-worth. Losing work can be unsettling to elementary ideas of self. Like I said, I don't like that work is so ingrained in our conscious, but there it is, and most of us can't change it. And, of course, there's the bigger fact that work is a necessary vehicle for most of us to have security and actualization, to have someplace to live, to conduct ourselves in a certain level of physical comfort, to pursue the kind of social lives that most of us consider the actual point of life. People howl with derision when I talk about a right to work, and I'm not actually talking about some sort of right assured by law, I guess. But my feeling that it should be a part of the compact of living in a society and fulfilling certain societal expectations that those who are willing to work be able to, though they may have little say in the quality or compensation of that work. But you know what "should be"s are worth.