Ironweed Redux

There's a scene in Ironweed in which Meryl Streep's character, Helen Archer, walks into a church and asks for a minor miracle. She admits she's never been much of a churchgoer or a believer but she has nowhere to turn. At the end of her doglegged prayer, she looks down and finds a twenty dollar bill, a find that, in the Great Depression, could've surely been seen as an act of Divine Providence, literally manna from heaven.

We are in another Great Depression, make no mistake about it. It isn't Obama's fault, or Bush's fault or the fault of any one single president. This was a slow motion, collective slide toward the edge of the abyss that happened bit by bit with hardly anyone noticing. NAFTA, outsourcing of jobs, an orgy of deregulation, most notably the smashing of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, opened the door for our wonderful Free Market system to run free to wreak havoc in the financial and housing markets.

Maybe finding a $20 bill in the height of the Great Depression could be construed as an act of Divine Mercy but I never thought until now that just finding a job that can actually sustain me fiancee and I, one that would prevent us getting thrown into the street, would also require something akin to Divine Intervention.

We're about to go out again and begin anew the cycle of dropping pieces of paper into black holes. Those of you who are believers, pray for us. It's hard and cold out there, employers are arch and arrogant as they momentarily sit in their catbird seats, confident the pendulum will never swing the other way, raising standards and qualifications so that even janitors are required to have years of experience, ordinary factory jobs requiring degrees from 4 year colleges.

I don't expect any donations because my last appeal, made, admittedly, just two and a half weeks ago, met with zero responses either verbally or monetarily. My financial worries, deadly serious as they are to us (we're selling some of our belongings on Craigslist, to no avail), are getting tiresome, I know. I'm not asking for money, although it would be welcome. But at the very least, if you're a believer, please say a prayer for Barbara and me and hope that manna falls from heaven or somewhere so that we can keep a roof over our heads. The last shelter near us closed down years ago.