The economy is on most everyone’s mind recently.  Whether you’re in the trenches trying to make ends meet or high up in the political spectrum, the economy is on the forefront of consciousness.  The US Department of Labor released their findings in late November and the numbers it indicated painted a bleak picture of what most already knew - it’s bad and getting worse.  You may look at the pdf and glance at the 232,468 layoffs in October and shrug - but as we scroll down to the historical chart on that same first page, we’re seeing the beginnings of a jobless tidal-wave.

Let’s play a game - we’ll call it the “perspective game!”  232,468 - what does that mean?  It’s a number - albeit a large number.  Let’s take 1 off of there and expand on it.  Let’s leave the 232,467 behind for now and just concentrate on that solitary one.  One person in October received his/her “walking papers.”  Let’s give this person an identity - we’ll call him Joe.  No, not Joe the Plumber and he doesn’t have a six pack - enough of that.  Joe worked in say a financial firm - a career that he studied and received high scholastic marks for.  Joe perhaps has a family to support, a home loan to pay, and medical-insurance to maintain for his two kids.  His family relied on his income for everything including the food that was on the table every evening.  Joe, somewhere in the United States, now faces a very high level of uncertainty for not only the near future but in reading the news, a long-term dillema of “what am I going to do now?”  Now having to face options all of us would rather not, words like foreclosure and bankruptcy enter the familie’s vocabulary as they weigh all options.

We pan out from Joe’s situation, this one individual, from this one family, this one circumstance and now put him and his family back with the rest of the two hundred thirty two thousand four hundred and sixty seven “circumstances” and see that this is a grave situation.  And mind you, this is just October and the very begining of the “tidal wave.” What happend?  Do we shrug it off as a sign of the times and a cyclical phenomenon that we just have to “deal with” as it happens over and over again?  “Oh well, too bad for them, glad I’m not in that situation!  They must have made some poor decisions in their life - oh well - hope they learn from it!”

What poor decisions did they make to place themselves in this situation?  Earn a degree? Enter a financial field?  Live in a certain location in the US?  None of these things are poor decisions, they are just decisions that everyone makes.

Getting back to Joe - er nevermind, the now statistic.  Here’s the clincher - that situation expanded over half a million people and moving into the millions of “situations” brings forth changes that affect everyone - regardless of their location or employment or financial well being.  You don’t have to be an economic expert to realize that millions of foreclosures will make banks fold, decrease competition, make other banks stronger and perhaps more expensive (your bank perhaps).  But future bank costs is the least of the issues.  There’re healthcare repercussions, city and state services that will shut down, small businesses that relied on the eb and flow of families will now cease to exist.  A walking community, a thriving metropolis of commonwealth will dry up and be replaced with vacancy signs and vacant trash littered streets.  It affects us all.

Why the numbers game?  Why highlight our current situation in such a light? One reason - perspective.

It’s a powerful word that we need to get re-acquanted with more often than we do on a regular basis.  In a world filled with statistics and a need to “quantify” everything to make it valid, we lose sight of things (and people) that are beyond the numbers.  We cannot possibly quantify everything, all our actions, all our inactions - but we can think of them in larger terms, in a way that gives them validity - a reason.

You can apply this to a job, the economy, your family, the environment, the world community - everything.  It gives each one of those things and more a greater sense of validity - beyond calculation.  It’s not just a number of unemployed - it’s lives and communities beaten down.  It’s not just a cyclical economic downturn - it’s the rural community or village that will go vacant.  It’s not just someone in the household without a job - it’s all the emotional hardships that will be passed onto the rest of the family.  It’s not just mining for coal in one town - it’s the rivers and waterways downstream that are also negatively affected.  And because this is just one globe with everything inter-related (regardless of politics or continents), what we do here has an affect elsewhere - however small or however big.  It’s beyond the numbers and definitely not a game…