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| March 11, 2009 |
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Ignoring Clint
Eastwood's advice in "Dirty Harry" that opinions,
like certain body parts, are best kept to yourself.
| Eating out is on the rise.
At Soup Kitchens. |
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We've always had soup kitchens and food shelf
operations, but never so noticable since the Great
Depression as in the past year or two. Everyone now knows
someone out of work, or is out of work themselves, and some
of these people are falling from fairly high salary and
lifestyle levels.
As an aircraft broker, I work
with a lot of airline pilots to get planes delivered, and
lately it seems I talk to at least one a day that is either
furloughed, or about to be. No profession or job skill is
exempt, with layoffs in every profession. Basic living
expenses, food, utilities, and the house payment are topics
of conversation, are taking preference over non-essential
expenditures, and that list is including Christmas presents,
vacation trips, car buying, and I can tell you first-hand,
airplane purchases.
The stock market waits and
reacts the unemployment numbers, currently running about 7%,
well below the nearly 11% reached in 1982, but knowing
unemployed people, and having been unemployed myself years
ago, I know how misleading that percentage is. It isn't
counting people who have been unemployed so long they no
longer get benefits, it doesn't count people who have just
given up, and are not actively seeking work.
A
couple of months ago, my wife got a call from a relative, to
get the sad news that they'd lost their home in foreclosure.
It was a shock, they'd been married for a long time, the
kids were out of the nest, and we just assumed the home was
paid-for. It wasn't.
My oldest son lives in Nashua,
New Hampshire, and my wife and I get over there a couple
times a year, and really enjoy the area. I check the local
newspaper now and then, just to see what is going on, and
this winter there was a story about the local soup kitchen.
An anonymous donor offered to match all pledges up to
$500,000 and when the article was published, they've already
raised about one-half of that amount.
I did a
Google search for "soup kitchens" and up came over
3 million links. It looks like any town with a stop light
has a soup kitchen or a food shelf, and they all say how
pressed they are in this economy. There was an article
written by a single-mother, out of groceries, no money, who
had to take her 3 kids to a local kitchen for a free meal.
The woman was a well-educated college graduate with a
master's degree, who found herself in a situation. If you
think this couldn't happen to you, read her story
here
.
Global
Air Aviation Referral Service
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