When you stop, you die
Cottle, Thomas J.
WHEN YOU STOP, YOU DIE THE HUMAN TOLL OF MALE UNEMPLOYMENT THOMAS J. COTTLE It goes without saying that a man's work is essential to his identity. The little boy grows up knowing that someday he...
...Tell him...
...These are people where the main provider has been out of work for at least six months, and usually much longer...
...A man is supposed to hold down a steady job...
...no question about it...
...about working and not working...
...In truth, most of them have moved far beyond anything resembling mere discouragement...
...It is expected, moreover, that he will make something of his life, which he will do by working...
...something, i some little bit of life...
...I had been speaking with people mourning their deaths, and lives...
...The government calls people out of work longer than six months "discouraged workers...
...People like Brian McShane weren't feeling sorry for themselves...
...Dr...
...I hadn't been speaking with so-called discouraged workers only...
...Brian McShane was nei"No one else would, so Arnold decided to accept the responsibility for unemployment...
...Anything to show me he wasn't scared, 19 June 1992:17 that he was alive, that he had some energy left...
...They could tell you about the last bits of life seeping out of your body when you don't have a job...
...there's no concentration...
...you just do it and it keeps you alive...
...Accordingly, it is not merely that a man assumes he will work until retirement, or that he trembles at the sound of the numbers describing a gloomy economic landscape...
...But for centuries, men have been taught that eight or ten hours of steady work entitles them to this form of human compensation...
...he's just present at the dying...
...Believe me, you don't move, you'll die sitting there in that chair...
...He's telling you the truth as he lived it, and never forgot it...
...Like a chorus, the other men shouted out: "Damn straight," "You got that right," "Better believe it...
...I mean pull my clothes off and rape me, if he had to...
...So lots of men living right in this community may be in the same boat I am, but most of 'em ain't...
...he hasn't earned his keep or his place...
...The pattern, I suppose, bespeaks a form of chauvinism...
...Tell him what, Mac...
...Each man I spoke with knew it as clearly as a man knows it when a doctor tells him he has only a few weeks to live...
...The priest tells you about death...
...The men's shame often emerged as anger directed at their children: "What the hell you looking at...
...Tom's studying guys like me, out-of-work guys, you know what I mean...
...He's very depressed, isn't he...
...Got to keep on the prowl...
...Then I'm old- fashioned...
...1 Nothing disturbed them more than experts rejoicing in the i downturn of unemployment rates when each one knew that ( even 2 percent or 3 percent unemployment means that mil- 1 lions of human beings may be suffering as they were...
...Reading labor reports and < newspaper accounts, they hunt for the humanity that often gets lost in discussions of unemployment, for something they 1 themselves long ago had lost, and now are convinced they ! may never regain...
...Nothing hurt Brian McShane, i George Wilkinson, or Amos Payton as much as experts < debating the pros and cons of unemployement policies, argu- c ing for the necessity of a certain base rate of unemployment...
...He's not depressed at all...
...Commonweal 19 June 1992:15 ther an old or close friend, but I knew him well enough to know how furious he had been made to feel by the suggestion that he should just get up out of his chair...
...My father and his friends, they could tell you about death...
...But the words were the antithesis of what they all knew to be the truth: They feared being abandoned by their families, despite the belief that they deserved no less a punishment...
...A man like me wants to yell out, it's somebody else's fault...
...He doesn't know about death...
...George Wilkinson said it this way: "Men leave in the morning and come back at night with a pay check in their hand...
...He'll listen to you...
...I'm sick of looking at you, sitting there," Dorie McShane yelled at Brian one afternoon, unaffected by my presence in their home...
...There is someone to blame, and you don't need the police to find him...
...I drown, it's my fault...
...Not at all," the friend answered with uncharacteristic sternness, as if he wished to protect my father's reputation...
...To their wives they said, if you can't stand the sight of me you can always leave...
...Still, their shame, guilt, and depression precluded much of a battle...
...I thought of Johnnie's words months later when I listened to Gerry Murphy's description of himself...
...They had worked regular shifts, rarely taken days off, rarely came late...
...I recalled a family friend visiting him in the hospital months before my father actually died...
...18:19 June 1992...
...about living and dying...
...I wanted to be roughed up { that night and feel that he was really a man...
...Suddenly, my visits with unemployed men began coalescing around that single theme...
...Somebody in your house hit the lottery...
...If you want a show, go watch television...
...Hell, man, afraid of not being angry no more....Anger and fear, they're gonna keep you alert, like an animal...
...I don't know what we should be talking about...
...But you aren't an expert on this...
...Hell, I was twelve years old...
...They began hiding, masking feelings, running away from it all, and not surprisingly, canceling our appointments more frequently...
...I try...
...Private Lives and Public Accounts...
...1 t s much as the men with whom I visited 1 struggled to maintain control of their lives ( and destinies, in the end, economic and i market forces, along with human deci- i . sions, combined to break them down, and in some instances to kill them...
...I feel like I'm in a fog...
...I don't even know what I'm doing, you know...
...his books include Children's Secrets...
...1 Like sociologists, the unemployed understand the implica- s tions of government work policies...
...He cannot face his wife without a job...
...He's just heard about death...
...Men who had spoken with a characteristic toughness months before, now seemed embarrassed by my visits...
...I don't think I'm unable to do anything....[But] I'm told that I'm unemployable...
...It was the government or the company or 16.19 June 1992 Commonweal the economy that was at fault...
...Then there was that refrain about the government "taking my taxes for thirty years, and now they claim they've run out of benefits at twenty-six or thirty weeks...
...You want to know how much time they're giving me...
...I rose from my chair to shake Toonie O'Neill's hand, which was broad and rough...
...It's something you don't think about...
...But he was j dead...
...A year after uttering these words, George Wilkinson, once a manager of a small tool company, killed himself with a shotgun...
...In almost atavistic fashion, they knew it was not meant for them to die at home...
...No one would have called my father an expert, but he was...
...Covering their faces, their tracks, their own life stories, they acted out the parts of men Commonweal ashamed of themselves and of the utter mess they insisted they had made of their lives...
...That woman and those two kids upstairs..., they drown, that's also my fault...
...Kaput...
...I've known Toonie forty years, if I've known him a day...
...Similarly, when a man loses his job he loses his status in his home...
...Lost sheep," Jack Blum 1 had called them...
...Even if they have 20 percent unemployed, they still have 80 percent employed, and a lot of that 80 percent is black, ain't they...
...He may give last rites to the dying, but that's as close as he'll ever come...
...Whatever the topic, Payton could turn it back on himself in devastating terms: "But some black men found work...
...Indeed, it is this seemingly "inbred" assumption of working that makes long-term unemployment so drastic and traumatic for many men...
...I had an uncle once, didn't work for a helluva lot longer than you've been out of commission...
...In this regard, no one could assault Amos Payton as he himself did...
...Come on, you know...
...The longer my final account of them, the more they believed I had found their life to have merit...
...The unemployed men were telling me this same thing: We should be talking about you and me...
...Technically, probably, many of them could have been diagnosed as depressed, but that wasn't the point...
...Where unemployment hasn't hit, the threat of it fills the air...
...The friend, a psychiatrist, was upset by my father's weakening condition...
...Rather, he believes that no matter what the personal exigencies and national statistics, no matter what the talk in the bars or the reports on television, he will be going to work the next morning...
...she asked, almost rhetorically...
...I know I'm going to die in this chair...
...Tell him this is the way I'm coping with a story that's got a lousy ending...
...He feels he has no right to be there...
...Somewhere around the first anniversary of their unemployment, as it became clear that they might never again locate steady work, the tone of the men's conversations shifted...
...Rather than direct their anger outward at former bosses or the government, they turned it inward, portraying themselves as wrongdoers, transgressors, people who had committed grievous offenses...
...You'd do it for me...
...They were dying men, they even spoke of it...
...What'd you do, take an early retirement...
...Tom Cottle...
...He hasn't just heard about this...
...And if he's worried that I might die sitting here, tell him he ain't more worried about it than I am...
...These unemployed are the people Andre Gorz called the i "nonclass of nonworkers...
...I don't read the newspaper...
...When you stop you die...
...In its place was born an intensity of shame I hadn't before witnessed...
...and Hidden Survivors...
...Men who once ran six-figure businesses stand in unemployment lines alongside people who, two months earlier, were in their employ...
...There's no in-between....Working is breathing...
...You're a miserable sight...
...Good-bye...
...Forty-seven-year-old George Wilkinson had said it this way: "There's only two worlds: Either you work every day in a normal nine-to-five job with a couple weeks vacation, or you're dead...
...They could tell you about jobs, too...
...It also struck me that the ones who had disappeared, usually after years of being unemployed—and there were many of them—went away to die...
...But it's my fault...
...I used to...
...In fact he did reply: "Toonie O'Neill, meet Dr...
...it overtakes the entire being of a man...
...Because it is only "natural" that men work, there can be no preparation for unemployment...
...I want to respond, I do, and I don't...
...We were working pretty regular in those days...
...It's just that I can't really concentrate...
...John Nobles, Sr., had spent the last years of his life unemployed: "There are things, Tom, that make you an expert...
...You want to think about this thing that way...
...You're the doctor, so you tell him...
...For me to ask them about their childhoods, their remembrances of early career aspirations and evaluations of their lives, had become an opportunity for them to write their memoirs, to compose their own obituaries...
...That's his job, right...
...he's dying...
...Men with whom I had established close friendships suddenly were afraid to be seen...
...The little boy grows up knowing that someday he will have a job like his daddy or mommy...
...Jack Blum joked that shame and guilt were his middle names: "I'm the captain of the ship, right...
...Poor people, all walks of life, ethnic types, black, white: you don't make money, down to the bottom...
...In every quarter of the economy, small businesses and individuals are filing for bankruptcy in record numbers, large corporations are announcing unprecedented quarterly losses and laying off thousands of workers...
...I mean it...
...Hearing this last remark, Brian McShane, fifty-one years old and out of work thirty-nine months—and don't think he ever stopped keeping track—looked at me and grinned...
...In writing about the nature of work, sociologist Kai Erikson has remarked: "High rates of unemployment are i thought to be not only inevitable but natural" [my empha- ( sis...
...I recall something thirty-one-year-old Johnnie Nobles said when we were trying to reconstruct his father's life...
...Here's the real melting pot of this country...
...tions, each one, surely, feeling like a knife to the ribs: "Hey, Fred, how come you're home...
...Tell him I wanna die in this chair...
...Tell him that's the way I'm coping with being unemployed for forever now...
...It all begins with adults asking him that fateful question: What are you going to be when you grow up...
...dying friends have asked me...
...Ultimately, the men hunted for a single reason to keep going, and despaired over the fact that the existence of the f wives and children they so adored no longer sufficed as that < reason...
...They turned away from their families as well...
...I don't seem to have any concentration...
...The stories of these families inevitably are saddening since the longer a man goes without a job, the greater the likelihood he gives up hope of ever being re-employed...
...I have been called a vegetable...
...Although it sounds melodramatic, I had come to feel there was little difference between my visits to the homes of unemployed families and the visits one pays to terminally-ill people...
...America's workers were innocent victims...
...Fifty-six-years old, Gerry is one of America's atomic veterans...
...I recall a morning when Jack Blum, a man who had held numerous jobs in his forty-six years, looked about at the unemployment lines and observed: "I'm at the bottom and nobody likes it at the bottom...
...Believing this, it is understandable that a man would come home at the end of a day expecting dinner to be waiting for him, and the children, already bathed, ready for a little play and their nightly bedtime routine...
...At times the men did fight back, hardly valiantly, but they ( tried...
...And they're saying, "We should be talking about you and me and about living and dying...
...How many times did I find myself listen- i ing to the lamentations and expressions of incredulity of < strong, articulate, even eloquent people who believed fierce- < ly in the goodness of America, but who now could neither < fathom nor reconcile the idea of their country forsaking them, given the dues—in all meanings of that word—they ] had paid...
...I couldn't sit in one place at one thing for an hour...
...he's lived this...
...I asked...
...I'm just what they call 'free falling.' There's no plans or anything...
...But okay, somebody's got to be at the bottom...
...My mother was eager to get a psychological reading on my father...
...According to traditional values, this is all a man is meant to do...
...So maybe I'm also a murderer, huh...
...One of the more painful aspects of the unemployed man's existence is the daily obligation to answer a host of quesTHOMAS J. COTTLE is a sociologist and clinical psychologist affiliated with the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology...
...Tell him he hit the nail right on the head...
...Every man's an expert on what not working does to him...
...In the first months following their layoffs, I heard any number of protestations, particularly in conversations while in line at unemployment offices...
...Brian winked in my direction and grinned...
...And there is no longer reason for his child to feel proud of him...
...During one of his many angry moods, Jack Blum had told me: "The day that anger stops, like a motor, I'm dead...
...That's what makes a guy an expert...
...He's not making this stuff up...
...Americans presently confront a dismal employment scene...
...It was as if he wanted to say, You see, Doc, what I have to put up with every day...
...Whereas anger once may have been a life force, it now made them weary...
...Life was filled with possibilities...
...In time the men's anger receded, as though their bodies could no longer supply the strength that anger requires...
...And he's got something important to tell you...
...riving home that afternoon, I found myself thinking about the death of my father...
...And all of them," George Wilkinson used i to say, shaking his head so that his yellow silver hair fell i over his forehead, "could be saved...
...Makes me old-fashioned...
...The origin of these emotions is obvious...
...Brian looked at me...
...The men spewed vitriol at the state and federal governments for letting them down and abandoning them...
...Come on, I've always got a little extra around the house...
...I don't want to come home anymore and have you be the first thing I see...
...Their masculinity and strength sapped, they appeared shameful, childlike, as if they deserved to be the invisible, reclusive people they in fact had become...
...Indeed, throughout the literature of economic theory, < one finds the terms, "natural rates" of unemployment and ( "noninflationary full-employment rates," terms all meant to 1 disguise an ideological bias: namely, that for our economy to i work well, a certain number of people must be out of work...
...Sam, would you be insulted if I gave you a little something...
...They know why we come, and still it is always they who help us through the ordeal of conversing...
...What are are you going to do, Brian, sit there doing nothing...
...I kill me, my wife, and kids, and they don't even know they're being murdered...
...He once took pride in his ability to sell almost any product: "I want to work...
...Because you know how you know if a man's an expert...
...You listen to him, and you watch him, and something inside you says, this guy knows what he's talking about...
...More recently, I have heard: "The government bailed the S and L boys out of trouble with our money, but bail us out when we didn't break a single law, didn't make one wrong decision, how do you explain that one...
...I've been lost in the general scheme of things...
...Men like forty-nine-year-old Amos Payton, an unemployed cement worker, rode their anger as though life itself drew electricity from it: '"Fraid of getting angry, and getting angry 'cause I get afraid...
...Go ahead, Doc, tell him...
...I used to try to make plans...
...Gradually, I began to see my research on unemployed families in a wholly different light...
...There were no more painful words than those of Rosemary Mullen, desperate to vent her frustration with her husband: "He should have taken me somewhere, thrown me down, slapped me if that was the only thing that would have quieted me, and made love to me...
...Tell him the reason I don't get out of this chair is because there isn't a reason in the world good enough to get me out of this chair...
...And early on, the children learned not to talk about the unemployment situation, and never to question their dads about it...
...Not like you, Toones...
...They were like weary elephants looking for the burial ground...
...I know...
...They remained keenly aware of the huge numbers of t unemployed Americans, a network one imagines they found i to be a rather sacred congregation...
...For more than fifteen years I have been meeting with the families of the hard-core unemployed...
...He hasn't touched anything there...
...The worst thing, believe me, is to sit there not moving...
...Their discussions of educational and employment experiences and philosophies of living were all part of this final self-assessment and remembrance...
Vol. 119 • June 1992 • No. 12
