The Educated Jobless Americans

I dislike statistics because governments use them to distort truth, to push deep-rooted problems under official carpets and to finally succeed in moulding public opinion in their own favour. Since all governments lie to varying degrees, we will now see what the following figures tell us about the land of milk and honey (milk’s ‘m’ and honey’s ‘h’ gives us MONEY): the US of A.

No matter what America and its allies’ excuse might be for instigating Muslims globally, attacking their countries and taking over natural resources, and ruining things through Wall Street’s financial fiascos, the bitter truth is that nearly 150 U.S. banks have vaporized in 2009 and millions of Americans remain jobless.

Why should American woes cause problems for us? Now that is an intelligent question with a ready-made dumb answer: because we are now living in a well-connected global village. Very few will stop to think that if this is what it is like to live inside the American wet dream, we were much better off living in a state of bliss before a wet-dreamer dreamt it up.

The U.S. economic recession has taken a heavy toll on young Americans, with a record one out of five black men aged 20 to 24 neither working nor in school. What is their expensive education giving them in return?—nothing worth writing about right now.

Showpiece President Obama does not matter because American teenagers now find it virtually impossible to find jobs since the recession began in late 2007, with black youths and young people from low-income families facing the maximum brunt.

While 26 percent of American teenagers aged, 16 to 19 had jobs in late 2009, according to the U.S. Census Bureau data, this figure is at a record low since they began to keep statistics in 1948.

Employment counts the number of people with a job as a percentage of the entire work force. In December 2009, the unemployment rate was 10 percent and did not include people who felt so discouraged they stopped looking for work; they now rely on social security and whatever is left of medical care.

How can one even dream of starting a family when income has such a dangerous effect on joblessness? Take for example, Illinois where only 13 percent of low-income black teenagers held a job in 2008 compared with 48 percent of more affluent white, non-Hispanic teens. I am afraid that even distributing packs of Fair & Lovely cream amongst the coloured Americans will not do the trick.

People in the East, who still dream of making it in America, do not realize all this. Young minds who wish to study there, find jobs and dream of finally marrying a fair-skinned American virgin (just for the sake of argument, assume there is after all such a thing as ‘an all American virgin’), do not care how rampant joblessness is among high school dropouts aged 16 to 24.

If you think today is bad, wait until tomorrow when it gets worse. The young Americans neither are in school nor hold jobs that pay for nourishing American snacks such as Coca Cola and oversized bags of popcorn.