A Voice For The Unemployed

Had your fill of reading about who stormed out on whom, and who called whom “childish,” in the umpteenth round of D.C.’s debt ceiling talks? For a different look at the economic picture, head over to Yahoo!’s “The Lookout” blog, where former CJR staffer Zach Roth has a haunting post drawing on about 6,000 personal accounts from readers who have been out of work for six months or more.

Even after nearly three years of unrelentingly dismal macroeconomic news, the comments—in Roth’s post, and on a separate Tumblr page that features fuller versions of 50 reader replies—are heart-rending. In some cases, the punch comes from the sense of steadily lowered expectations: one correspondent writes about how his family gave up its car, along with “some of the other luxuries.”

In others, an almost Depression-era sense of bleakness, and resourcefulness, comes through. “My family is eating stir-fried dandelions out of yards to keep from starving,” writes one reader. Another declares, “I am Native so I have been able to deal with the loss of my home, etc and am living in an army tent in the woods and getting food from the woods and gardening.”