Rampage Aftermath: Fury of Jobless Grows

The day after Alan Winterbourne’s rampage in Ventura County, the headline said: “Fury, Anxiety of Jobless Grow, Experts Say.”

The experts are being laid off as well at Camarillo State Hospital. However, you need no experts to understand the anxiety of middle-class unemployment. Like the gamins in the streets of Brazil who sniff glue to ignore their deprivation, this subject needs no “crazed gun-loving nut” or “misunderstood loner” explanation. Such reasoning is an insult to those caught in this human tragedy. Let me tell you how one family is living with the experience.

A phone call in August was the first indication. The forced pretense, the forced joviality, the forced words: “The bad news is I’ve been laid off; the good news is, I have six weeks to linger with pay,” he said. And linger he did.

He thought that he would be employed as a matter of course. He told himself that he would not be in this position by Christmas. Working 25 years straight can do that to you.

He went through the paces; he rose early, dressed in his slacks, shined his shoes and went off to the great queuing halls. There, he met others grasping for some control. Job clubs, resume perfecting and networking are the preferred methods.

But the networks are tapped.

He applied for openings in his exact field. The requisitions were on hold. He applied for similar occupations; after all, he had transferable skills and comes with a bonus package. He has job training funds available to any future employer who wishes to train him.

No luck with the training-fund angle either.

He has a B. S. in business and worked as a computer security specialist for defense firms. He is effectively retired at the age of 45.

Who would have thought that he would need his retirement savings so soon? And, yet, he’s grateful. The savings have bought one more year.

It will be a year of extension courses for certificate programs in computer science. Luckily, he is in a technologically prudent profession.

But so are the rocket scientists, entrepreneurs and former engineers at the Employment Development Department. Many are technologically gifted. There are no jobs.

He has the flu today, but he still attends to his volunteer work. The high school band needs something repaired, invented or whatever. He does his part.

There is a bright spot. Our son now qualified for college loans since our fall from middle-class status. But this small consolation is aggravated by his need to work two jobs to support himself. I’m waiting for that particular teen-age Angst : “Where did college get you guys, mom?”

You need no more experts. Those experiencing this middle-class devastation can tell you first-hand. Like deer in the headlights, unemployed Americans are stunned, desperate and disbelieving.

Alan Winterbourne, 33, computer systems engineer, gave it a good try. Seven years and 300 rejections later, Winterbourne did the unthinkable. “It wasn’t the Alan we knew,” Pastor Dave Hall said.

Yes, the fury and anxiety of the jobless grow. Our family is no longer upwardly mobile. Digesting that fact is the hardest thing to swallow.

LAURA CRONIN

Thousand Oaks