Then they might understand the plight of people who lose their jobs and are unable to find new ones before they spend their last few dollars. Should that be the requirement for such “public servants,” they wouldn’t oppose expanding or extending jobless benefits during a lingering recession like we’re now experiencing.
Last spring Mississippi’s Democratic legislators led a push to rewrite the state’s conservative unemployment benefits structure in order to tap additional federal stimulus dollars.
“If the state were to change its formula, it would qualify it for several tens of millions of dollars in extra compensation benefits than what we’re getting now,” Senate Labor Committee Chairman John Horhn, D-Jackson, said.
Unfortunately, Mississippi’s Republican Gov. Haley Barbour led the opposition to those changes, saying they would trigger a hike in taxes on businesses when the federal money runs out.
Perhaps, the well-to-do Barbour just can’t quite grasp what it’s like to go without a job.
Well, we know a man who can. Even though he only once lost a job during his more than 40 years in the work force, he spent 10 long months looking for a new one. During that time, he lost his house, sent out resumes, lived with the family of a good friend, and eventually helped start a street shelter, where he both lived and worked as director.
Before he was offered a spot at the shelter and prior to the end of the waiting period to become eligible for unemployment benefits, he would boost his sagging self-confidence as he began most days by reading over and over again a passage from the third chapter of Lamentations in his dog-eared King James Version of the Bible, which says:
“It is of the LORD’s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness. The LORD is my portion, saith my soul; therefore will I hope in him.
“The LORD is good unto them that wait for him, to the soul that seeketh him. It is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the LORD.”
On Christmas Eve, 1984, he spent a fraction of his last $25 on a Philly cheese-steak sandwich, and then he spent the rest of the money for a birthday cake for Jesus and other party items down at Kroger.
When he called his old office to check on something the following week, the secretary with whom he was talking said, “Oh, by the way, we’re sending you a check for $2,500.”
He was so excited about receiving the money, he forgot to ask why his old company was giving it to him. The company didn’t owe him anything, but it didn’t really matter because he reasoned in his heart the Lord had simply multiplied his last $25 by a hundredfold.
Eventually the man landed a job just before his last unemployment check arrived.
Normally, in view of our $13 trillion national debt, the man might have been concerned about President Barack Obama extending the emergency unemployment compensation program, a program which will assist about 18,000 Mississippians who had previously exhausted their eligibility for unemployment benefits.
But he had long ago experienced what it’s like to be running out of time and money, and he never forgot the sense of desperation he felt and believes millions of jobless people in this nation of ours may now be feeling.
Consequently, when he read the news Tuesday about the 18,000 jobless Mississippians receiving an extension of their benefits, the only thought that occurred to him was, “It is well in hard times like these that Big Brother should be his brother’s keeper.”