June 29, 2006
Hidden Consequences
Recently there was a fatal automobile accident in our town. It happened on quiet serpentine road that winds through the woods into the center from the highway -- a head on collision in which a Corolla veered into oncoming traffic, hitting a Porsche, and killing its two occupants. The driver of the Corolla survived, and later told authorities that he was trying to kill himself.
What could this man have been thinking? I can only specutate.
If you watch the local news video of his arraignment until the end, you will see some brief interviews with his neighbors, who speak of him fondly. He is a 64 year old engineer who had been unemployed for the last year and a half. I suspect he falls into the category of The Disposable American
Publisher's Weekly says of Louis Uchitelle's book
Devoting a book to the necessity of preserving jobs is perhaps a futile endeavor in this age of deregulation and outsourcing, but veteran New York Times business reporter Uchitelle manages to make the case that corporate responsibility should entail more than good accounting and that six (going on seven) successive administrations have failed miserably in protecting the American people from greedy executives, manipulative pension fund managers, leveraged buyouts and plain old bad business practices. In the process, he says, we've gone from a world where job security, benevolent interventionism and management/worker loyalty were taken for granted to a dysfunctional, narcissistic and callous incarnation of pre-Keynesian capitalism. The resulting "anxious class" now suffers from a host of frightening ills: downward mobility, loss of self-esteem, transgenerational trauma and income volatility, to name a few.
The suicidal engineer was 60, which means he lost his job at 58, and with it, probably his pension . Maybe he's been jobhunting for along time, and lost hope. Maybe his unemployment insurance ran out, as did his severance package. Maybe he thought he'd find something much sooner, and maxed out all his credit cards. He lives in a nice house in a nice neighborhood, which might be becoming financially overwhelming. Maybe he has kids in college. Maybe he thought that a suicide made to look like an auto accident would allow his family to collect his life insurance. Maybe he felt he was worth more to them dead than alive.
Causing the death of two others, radically compounds this tragedy. If only he had chosen a larger car with which to collide, the consequences may not have been so grave. Since he was an engineer, one would assume that he might have thought of that. Depression affects your ability to think clearly.
And what of the younger engineers who are out of work. The dean of health sciences at a state university told me that his nursing program is full of engineers, retraining for a job that can't be outsourced..
Photo Note: Bent shadow of a garbage can -- metaphorophotographically speaking.
Posted by Dakota at June 29, 2006 08:12 PM