ON BEING A JOB CREATOR

I am a job creator. 

I am nearing 83 years of age, a mother/grandmother/great-grandmother, and retired school-teacher.  Twelve years ago, after 20 years of teaching, I retired to my place in the sun, a 22-acre site in West Virginia where I have gardens, an orchard, a pond, a woodlot, poultry—chickens, ducks, geese, guineas, turkeys—two dogs and five cats.  I buy feed and seed at the local feed store, lumber, tools, and supplies at the local hardware/lumber store, groceries, household supplies, and pet food at the local food market, seeds and plants at the local nursery, produce at the local farmers market.  I am a job creator.   I hire local contractors or unemployed workers for house and barn maintenance, fence building, driveway grading, field mowing, garden tilling, hauling manure and compost, laying new flooring or installing new windows; next up—a new roof this spring.  I am a job creator.  I have two vehicles—a ‘94 Toyota pickup and a 2000 Volvo SW.  I get repairs and maintenance and tires at the local garage, parts at the local auto parts store, gas and oil at the local gas station.  I am a job creator.  I often shop online for books, music, housewares, clothing.  Jobs for the manufacturers, clerks, packers, shippers, mail carriers.  I am a job creator.  Does that make me a “maker?”

But it wasn’t always thus.  After having been a homebody for 20-odd years, I went to work.  But I soon tired of an office job, decided that if I were going to work the rest of my life, I wanted something more stimulating and more rewarding.   So, now divorced and with children still at home, I enrolled in college, and in 2-1/2 years got a teaching degree.  But it wasn’t easy.  With Pell Grants, student loans, and scholarships financing my education, we lived on child support, and the children got free school lunches; though we qualified for food stamps, we didn’t apply because we raised and put up our own produce from the garden, and as well, we raised chickens, a pig, a beef, milk goats, sheep.   We could eat well even when we were out of heating fuel.   Without the government help, I could never have achieved this.  For all this, conservatives would have labeled me a “taker,” if such a term were in use at the time.

But there will be rough patches.  After about ten years I found myself unemployed, applied for unemployment compensation benefits.  Hmmm, “taker” again.  There were not jobs readily available in my field.  So I enrolled in college again to take courses that would widen my employment possibilities, and as well, took Montessori training followed up by an internship.   To do all this, I had to sign a statement that I was taking the courses in order to broaden my employment possibilities, and that if a suitable job came along, I would drop the college courses and take the job.  As it was, this stint enabled me to gain employment as a Montessori teacher in a public school, where I taught for 12 years until my retirement. 

Where would I be today were it not for that social safety net provided by those compassionate and pragmatic legislators and executives who cared what happened to me?