From Miss Pink Slip, a blogger who realizes the self-help she's addicted to isn't helping her. But it isn't helping us get a better stimulus package either. Her post is at: http://misspinkslip.wordpress.com/2009/08/13/i-need-help-for-self-help/

If 15 million people are unemployed at the same time, are they each individually to blame? Of course not. How could they be? You can discuss that with us on our Tikkun Phone Forum topic tomorrow night (more below).

The Rate

If you count the “discouraged workers” (who gave up looking in the last year) and the “marginally attached workers” (who gave up before that but would take a job if offered) and those who need a full time job but are meanwhile working part time, the number of unemployed is more like 27 million people.

I found this explanation in plain English helpful and took the current (September) stats from two Bureau of Labor Statistics reports: the first is a press release that manages to avoid ever saying that number of 27 million, though its figures do add up to it, and the other has an easy-to-read table showing the rates of the different categories of the unemployed and underemployed. The full rate, the U6 rate, was at 17% for September.

We are told the unemployment rate hit 25% in the Great Depression. How many of the underemployed that are included in today’s U6 rate were included in that? And what about all the self-employed whose incomes tanked, then and now: are they counted anywhere?

Beware of Self-Blame

So are you one of the 27 million? The Self-Help movement, if that’s what it is, or publishing scam, which is all it often is, may tell you you have to shape up and visualize success. There may be an ounce of truth in that. If I was fired for poor performance, of course, I would learn whatever lessons I could from it. If I could use my unemployment to take classes and get better at my field, of course I would try to crank myself up to do so.

BUT: self-blame may just make you miserable and alone, and prevent you from joining with other unemployed people to change the economic system!

Remember? that’s what the unemployed did in the Great Depression. Enough of them got mad enough that they changed the system. Not as big a change as many of them wanted. But still, uncountable millions have benefited from the changes made.

The fact is this. We ALL lose if we EACH blame ourselves for our unemployment — or if we support our unemployed friends and relatives in thinking that it’s all just up to them individually to shape up.

For deeper analysis of the psychology of Americans today around this issue, read this piece by Ofer Sharone in the current Tikkun. And join us on our Phone Forum tomorrow night to hear from and personally speak with Sharone. [The Phone Forum is for current Tikkun subscribers and members of the Network of Spiritual Progressives, but it is a free call for everyone and if you like it enough to join in again, then subscribe for only $29 a year for six issues of the print magazine ($25 if you use the card in the magazine): it's on the honor system, we will trust you to do so.]

Teaser quote from Sharone’s piece:

Cross-national research shows that self-blame is far more common and intense among American workers than among workers in other advanced economies. For example, my research shows that Israeli white-collar workers typically blame the state or “the system” for their difficulties, and only rarely themselves. To explain self-blame among unemployed Americans requires examining the effects of the dominant institution that structures the subjective and practical experience of job searching in the United States: the self-help industry.