I hope this is just a weird coincidence but today I was walking along Wilshire Blvd. with my daughter and as we passed the Ralph’s (a local grocery chain) we saw two Ralph’s employees forcibly restraining a guy who appeared to have been caught shoplifting. The guy was young, tall and thin, long, dark hair, dressed in black, looking like he stepped off a vampire movie poster. As he struggled, small packages fell out of his pockets. The two Ralph’s guys were smaller than he but were managing to hold onto him despite his best efforts to be Somewhere Else before the cops got there.
By the time I crossed Wilshire all of them were gone, presumably inside the store to await the LAPD who I’m sure love nothing better than to deal with felonious abductors of Twinkies and Slim Jims in a city with 65,000 gang members.
Anyway, after we got home I saw a headline that 40,000 Americans lost their jobs today.
Yeah, TODAY.
And the projections are more to come, to the tune of 10% national unemployment before the end of the year. And that would just be the official count, since after a certain point they stop counting you if you haven’t worked for X amount of time.
I try to imagine what it would be like in a nation this size where one out of ten former breadwinners is Sure Outta Luck. Their savings dry up in weeks, there’s no credit to live on, no social safety net, no frame of reference for people to whom this has never happened before.
I see a lot of scared, angry, frustrated people with easy access to guns and I wonder how you keep a lid on them when they start to get hungry.
That guy outside the Ralph’s didn’t look poor. He looked like a suburban brat whose parents had to stop sending him money.
He looked like a canary in a coal mine.
