Monday, February 9, 2009

Watching the Jobs Go

This may just be too depressing - but look anyway. If you hide your head in the sand, you can't help, can you? There's a place you can go to see what jobs have been lost.

http://layofftracker.blogspot.com/

Why do you need to know this, you ask? Is it necessary to bury ourselves in this misery up to our necks just to feel connected? Well, maybe. But there's another reason.

Most of the problems this country has had stemmed from blind trust. We believed what we were told. Some of us were naive, some just gullible, others too lazy to check the facts. Or some combination of the above. Those days are over if we want things to get better. It's time to take responsibility, check the facts, know what's really going on and then make sure the people we elect to take action hear whatever opinion we have. Those opinions have extra gravitas because they're informed opinions, not knee-jerk "I heard it from him/her so it MUST be true!"

I know a guy who says his father used to yell at him for spouting out other people's opinions as fact. "Papagallo!" his dad hollered. (That's Italian for parrot.) "Make up your own mind!"

Good advice, America. Good advice, planet. Blindly following whoever sounds good or makes us feel better has gotten us into nothing but trouble. Any institution that insists on blind faith has some explaining to do. We are thinking creatures. We reason - or we should. Think, study and form your own conclusions.

So back to the litany of misery - we need to know what jobs are being lost and where. We need to be informed about how bad things are. We need to know if it's urgent. Because if we sit back and wait for politicians to make it all better with no pressure from us, we're going right over a cliff. And we will be the ones to blame.

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