People out of work can sometimes receive unemployment compensation.  Some are too proud to accept money for doing nothing.  Others will work at jobs that are below their educational level - just to be working to earn money to try to live on.  I know of a great many young people who refused jobs they considered beneath them.  They wanted the premier job they thought themselves qualified for and nothing less.  In this economy, looking for a job, any job seems to be a necessity although some of the thinking listed above shows that personal pride in one way or another intrudes and confuses the issue of having to work is necessary.

One summer after serving in World War II before I took advantage of the G.I. Bill and went to Rutgers at the Government's expense where I took a curriculum that led me to become a teacher, I drove a taxi.  I had friends at the Jersey Shore where I lived who worked at the boardwalk in various jobs in the games and entertainment offered there.  Such jobs were seasonal but somehow I decided to follow a lead and took a job working for "Golden Cab", becoming a taxi driver.  I had to pass a test showing I knew the streets and avenues along the Shore city of Long Branch, passed it and began to drive a cab there although I knew nothing about the innards of the taxi.  I soon found out that I should have shown I knew to check the oil after every session I put in.  No one told me and so I ruined the engine of the cab I drove and this put the man who would have gotten into my cab for his eight hours out of work for a day.  Being new I was put on the night shift.  I didn't know nor care that I would earn less in the night hours but I had a job.

I learned a lot from driving that cab.  Mr. Golden, who owned the taxi company and named it after himself, was a piece of work.  He was stupid enough to keep me even after I showed my ignorance of having to check oil every time you left work.  I didn't even know how to put oil into the car.  But, I did learn about the different people who drifted into this kind of work and got an education about abilities and personalities and found that I had little in common with all them except the other "going to college" fellow who years later became my backdoor neighbor.

I had worked in my father's grocery store.  I stocked shelves and waited on customers.  I also had a summer job before going into service working at making screws in Mr. Charles Marti's screw making factory.  I wound transformers in Hoboken and I wasn't afraid to take a job that my self-worth or education didn't prepare me for. 

A nation out of work is a nation that will soon have social unrest.  We should do something to provide work for the young, those wanting families and the old who want to continue to be productive. I think Mr. Obama knows this.