Resurrection: My Easter Post

So is it really time for another post?  I guess so.  I've decided this blog is really depressing.  Even more depressing than the news from Boston this past week: we love you, we can't hire you, check back with us soon.  If you love me, hire me.  It's that easy, right?  I thought the economy added jobs at the fastest pace in the last three years?  So why aren't you hiring me?  Oh, wait...it was factories, stores, hospitals and the Census which added jobs.  Is that why I received my final notice to fill out my census before a census worker contacts me?  I filled it out and returned it the day I got it in the mail.  But I suppose the government just wanted to keep workers busy by stuffing and licking envelopes and taking boxes upon boxes of these gentle reminders to the post office.  It also kept the postal office in business, I imagine.  I hear they were considering stopping postal service on Saturdays.

It's funny to me that some people will take this as good news.  Of course the economy, at some point, was bound to add jobs at the fastest pace in three years.  But what does that really mean?  It means we've lost so many bloody jobs in the last three years but now we are having a slight anomaly in hiring because of the decennial census, Easter shopping and since Americans haven't been buying anything for the last three years, they finally need to, so factories are producing marginally more goods to keep us clothed or whatever for the next few years while we continue to buckle down on expenses and saving money.  That's my analysis.  

Read it, ladies and gentlemen: 15 million workers still out of work.  But I wonder how they come up with this number.  Does it account for the millions that have just dropped off the unemployment benefit rolls because they've been out of work for so long?  That's what I really wanted the census to ask: Are you working?  And, do you want to work?  If you answer no and yes, respectively, then I want that number tallied.  Let's see how many people out there are really unemployed.  Or underemployed, but that's more of a grey area.

Cries of, "this is for real" and "we're really very optimistic" and such are made irrelevant when a garden center in Virginia is hiring 100 people, but an increasing number of applicants for these jobs are laid off white collar workers.  We might be getting jobs back, but in the service sector, not in the high end white collar world where people such as myself struggle to return to the life we once knew and not as a garden center employee.  

My Easter wish is this: the economy is resurrected to a genuinely sustainable state; that all workers who want to work have work that they love; that you and yours receive God's grace, goodness and peace during this economic recovery.