Southern California Job Market : Life Is Not a Career : IT’S AN ADVENTURE; YOU COULD LOOK IT UP

Read the obituaries.

Cheerful thought, huh? Well, try it. If you’re discouraged about the American dream, or more important, your own dreams, get a little perspective. Read about the dead.

The life of Judge John Sirica, who died recently at 88, is a fine, convenient place to begin. The man who presided over the Watergate burglary trials of 20 years ago--and who said flatly that no one, not even the President, is above the law--was the son of a barber from Naples.

His family moved around in search of work, from Connecticut to Florida, to Louisiana, Virginia and Washington, where Sirica took a stab at law school but found it difficult. So he dropped out to take up boxing.

Sirica eventually got a law degree but continued fighting in the ring until his mother persuaded him it was a waste of his education. He practiced law, got a government job, left it in 1934--the depths of the Depression--and set up his own law office. Naturally enough, John Sirica had trouble getting clients.

Eventually he had some modest success as a lawyer and a judge until, at age 68, two years from retirement, he cheered his anguished countrymen with his unflinching integrity in the Watergate case.

So read the obituaries, but if you really want perspective, read biography. There’s one out now of a man who at the age of 40, without visible prospects, “was living in his mother-in-law’s house overlooking the failure of his business,” a haberdashery on the main street of Independence, Mo.

Harry S. Truman managed to get on in life anyway. Among his chief assets, when he somehow became President, was a toughness born of adversity--and a deep knowledge of history.

Tough times aren’t new. Times are always adverse, not only for the few who hope to climb mountains but also for the many who wish merely to till the fields in the valley below.

The decades of Sirica’s and Truman’s young lives were haunted by financial panics and depressions--although nostalgia today casts them in a glow of the good old days.

There were no good old days. Even the supposedly halcyon 1950s began with the now-revered Truman hooted from office for corruption and the bloody Korean War. Jim Crow lived, women baked and gays hid in very small, very dark closets. Remember that earlier McCarthy? The blacklist? Polio? The prosperous ‘50s averaged paltry economic growth of just 2.2% a year. They even had two or three recessions.

Read biographies. Dostoevsky survived a firing squad, epilepsy, compulsive gambling, a bad publisher and mountainous debt. Churchill weathered obscurity and miscalculation. Margaret Sanger was jailed. Paul Robeson lived as an exile. A penniless Samuel Goldwyn walked across Europe to reach America, where he and men like him articulated its imaginings.

Do you have cable TV? Reflect for a minute: Nobody predicted cable’s rise. As recently as the early 1980s, Ted Turner of CNN was seen as a bumptious upstart--from Atlanta!--when he dared challenge the majesty of CBS. Nobody predicted VCRs or video stores, either.

Television in America was dominated by three major networks--big corporations, with classic male managements. But lately the world of television has been fragmenting with a proliferation of cable channels and cable networks.

Who holds the top jobs at those ? Often, women. The presidents of five cable channels are women--Nick at Nite, USA, Discovery, American Movie Classics and Bravo. Other women hold top programming positions at Lifetime, A&E; and MTV.

The late Jay Sharbutt reported that the women who lead cable channels once worked in network TV. But all had seen the hierarchies and the endless meetings and decided their chances were better in the smaller, newer, freer world of cable. And so they have been.

The ‘50s are said to be the golden age of television. In the ‘60s, if you were a union man with a job in a big factory, you had your own little golden age.

But wise up. There has never really been a golden time. Not in ancient Athens and not in the United States. The most obvious truths bear repeating: Life is tough and unplannable. You’ll make it anyway.

Lately the U.S. Labor Department has been peddling a wacky forecast that relatively few good jobs will be created this decade, and that the fastest-growing occupations will be janitors and maids. Hogwash.

The important point for today’s job seekers is that nobody knows much about the future except that it gets better. All you can do is dream and study and work--and reflect on the lives of those who have gone before.

Study a person such as Linda Laubenstein, who died recently at 45, possibly from the lingering complications of polio that had made her a paraplegic at age 5. A life spent amid the ravages of disease? Exactly.

Dr. Laubenstein graduated in a wheelchair from Barnard College and New York University Medical School to became a specialist in the treatment of cancer.

She was one of the first physicians to discover the mysterious illness that came to be known as acquired immune deficiency syndrome--AIDS--and worked tirelessly to help its victims.

What do the obituaries teach us? That life is not a career. It is an adventure.