Rant #2,457: I Should Be Laughing

Ha Ha.

Yes, I should be full of glee today.

That phone appointment that I had postponed this past week has been rescheduled for this Wednesday afternoon, so maybe, just maybe, things are looking up for me.

They better be, because the enhanced unemployment goes back to regular unemployment this week, meaning the extra cash that unemployed people like myself were given to try to stay afloat is done and over with.

And Congress, as usual, cannot come up with a plan to make things right.

Personally, I am not asking them to give us the same amount that they had been giving us for the past several weeks.

But it is clear that this pandemic is not going away, many of our jobs have vanished and are not coming back at all, and despite supposed job growth, there simply aren't many positions out there that are worth filling.

I have already made my bed to lay in, as I will be retiring come September; but can you really expect people to take a 75 percent pay cut from their previous, working salary just to say they have a job?

I don't think so, and if any new jobs are being offered, they are in the lower pay range, and you cannot ask people who made, let's say, $50,000 a year to take $15,000 a year, and that is without health benefits, without 401Ks, without anything added on to even try to make it attractive.

Well, a job is better than no job, isn't it? It is, but to take such a job after decades of moving up the ladder is absolutely demeaning, and a lot of people simply won't do it.

I am not saying that they are correct in their thinking, but I can certainly understand it. In my own career, this is literally the third time I have been unemployed during the past 40 or so years, and each time, to get back on the horse so to speak, I have taken positions that paid me much less than my previous one.

So I have been there, done that, and if I do get something, it will be the third time I have done this, but, of course, this time will be way different than the other times for me at least.

I have to tell you, I have seen these jobs being advertised ... heck, I have even applied for a few of them just to see what would happen. And I have to tell you, I have yet to hear from any of these places.

So it is clear to me that even if these jobs exist--which I have my doubts about to begin with--they simply aren't looking for people like me.

And then what about people like my son?

He sits in forever limbo here, on perpetual furlough, and we just hope that he has a job to go back to when his place of business gets back to business.

I just hope he is not being strung along, only to be told that in this new world, he has nothing to go back to.

He will have wasted weeks and months sitting here waiting and waiting for the call. What do you tell him if his job does not exist anymore?

Right now, it does. He has been told that it does, so we have to go with that thinking.

But yes, it is depressing.

I should also be laughing with glee at Major League Baseball, with the season finally started and there actually being something to watch on television, but I have found that even watching these games is depressing.

First, we have to be rattled into our brains about social justice and racism and hatred and all the other reasons our country is so horrible as the broadcast plays out.

We have to see players kneeling during the playing of the National Anthem, which is their right to do but smarts of misinformation and quite frankly, utter stupidity.

We have to have the suddenly mainstream Black Lives Matter shoved in our faces, as if no other lives matter than black ones (and by the way, I WILL NOT go by the way of current journalistic practices here, which all of a sudden is capitalizing the "b" in black when talking about race, but keeps the "w" in white lower case while talking in the same context. It is wrong, it is condescending, and it is pandering, and I won't be part of that in any way, shape or form.

Anyway, then we have to sit through the games, which have no electricity without fans in the stands, and without announcers calling the games in person.

Crowd noise has been added, some teams are allowing cardboard cutouts of fans in the stands, and there has been talk of digitally placing fans in the stands so, I guess, us stupid fans can "see" the energy.

I don't buy it at all, but I guess this is the best we are going to get, at least now, with baseball and the other major sports, so we have to like it or lump it.

Me, I guess I am lumping it, but being a true fan of the game, I guess I am watching it, too.

Believe me, watching even this diluted baseball season is better than watching the network news shows ... you talk about pandering ... goodness, I simply cannot believe what I am watching from news outlets that are supposedly reporting the news rather than making personal commentaries on what they consider to be newsworthy.

Yes, Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite are both turning over in their graves at what the network news has become. When I see Kanye West's mental problems as a major news story, I know that we have fallen off the cliff already.

So yes, I should be laughing, but I guess I'm not because there really isn't anything to be laughing about.

Steve Martin once said, "Comedy is not pretty," and related to the current time, he is so right.

I just need someone to slip on that proverbial banana peel, and fall on their tuckis, and then, maybe I will laugh out loud again.