Frustration and Despair as Job Search Drags On By MICHAEL LUO CARLISLE, Ky. — In her well-thumbed, leather-bound Bible, Terri Sadler recently highlighted in bright pink a passage in the Gospel of Matthew. In it, Jesus urges his followers not to “worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.”
But Ms. Sadler’s tightening throat and halting breath when she tries to read the words aloud make it clear that she is having trouble mustering enough faith to follow them.
Ms. Sadler, who lost her job at an automotive parts plant in October 2008, learned last month that her unemployment insurance had been cut off. She is one of an estimated 2.1 million Americans whose benefits have expired and who are waiting for an end to an impasse that has lasted months in the Senate over extending the payments once more to the long-term unemployed.
Times have changed politically, however, and opposition is growing in Washington and abroad to deficit-bloating government spending, even for those who are hurting.
For Ms. Sadler, and many like her, each passing day has become an excruciating countdown of debts and deadlines.
“I’m basically applying for everything, trying to get something,” said Ms. Sadler, 52, who since early June has not received an unemployment check, which used to be about $388 a week before taxes. “If I don’t, I’m going to lose everything. I’m not going to have a roof over my head. I’m just going to have to walk away with what I have on my back, and my dog.”
She is down to $44 in her purse and a quarter-tank of gas. She says she has exhausted the help of family and friends.
Members of her tiny Baptist church just up the road from her cramped mobile home pooled their money on Sunday to come up with her car payment and insurance. A county ministerial association paid her water bill. A nonprofit organization covered her last two electric bills.
A notepad on her refrigerator lists the other outstanding bills: $102 cellphone, $79 cable and Internet, which she relies on for job-hunting; $15 for her credit card; and $30 for an end table she had bought on layaway. Not listed was $275 for her rent this month, which she still owes.
Every morning, after Ms. Sadler takes her dog out and turns on the coffee maker, she switches on the television to C-Span. Then she cracks open her laptop to resume a job hunt that has become frantic.
But as she has run low on money, her search has also become increasingly circumscribed. She used to drive to drop off résumés with businesses; now she is mostly limited to scanning online listings. ..... more at Frustration as Job Search Drags On
"When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies but the pack survives." Winter is Coming Now this is the Law of the Jungle—as old and as true as the sky; And the wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the wolf that shall break it must die. As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk, the Law runneth forward and back; For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.
