I would like you to tell me when you hear the first lawn mower in your neighborhood.  My good friend Tom Hauf the meteorologist, used to keep track of this annual milestone every year on his weather reports for WTVH-TV.  One might think it’s a detail that matters only to those who have nothing better to think about.  But I’ve learned such markers do matter.

The topic of conversation among my family and friends often turns to the need to work longer than planned since the stock market tanked last September and took almost half of everyone’s retirement money along with it.  It forced an unwelcome change in retirement plans.  Some of my friends have lost jobs.   Some will lose them still.  The world is moving quickly now.

So now we need to balance all that change with what never changes, and grass that grows so much it must be cut, is a good place to start.   Think about it.  Whether you tend to your lawn with fertilizer and weed killer, or you don’t, this is the time when you can count on the yard looking weird; that slice between when grass is still sleeping and a few motivated pieces are waking up.

An ambitious tuft of grass

All it took was yesterday’s unusual warmth and sunshine and a little bit of rain overnight to spout a greener, more motivated lawn today.  It’s not all growing evenly.  It has cowlicks, like hair when you first get out of bed, or a little kid’s self-inflicted hair cut.   When my lawn produces cowlicks,  it’s just a matter of time before someone’s lawn mower powers up while I’m still in bed on a Saturday or Sunday morning.   As the weeks progress, that sound and it’s accompanying sliced grass fragrance, will be so ubiquitous that I won’t hear or smell it at all, but at this time of year it always seizes my attention.

So if it captures yours too, please tell me about it.  Tom used to say the first weekend in April is reliably when he can hear the mowers in his northern suburb.  That’s next weekend.  Six more days.  Six more days to appreciate that unique half green, half gold yard out there, the one with clumps  getting a head start on the rest before it all comes up pretty much the same, the kind of lawn I see this time every year, no matter how much or how little is in the bank.

Much is written about the current restructuring of our society.  We don’t know where we’re going, but we’re on our way.

Every Lamplighter eventually lost his job

Like the Gaslight Era which began with streetlights and armies of Lamplighters to manage them, and domestic light fixtures of metal and pipes and fireproof glass globes, and which ended with all things electric, we are witnessing a complete substitution of one thing for another.  The need for lighting didn’t go away, it increased, and new armies of workers rushed in to work the nascent system.  It’s happening again today with accelerated purpose:

Newspapers and television stations are going away.  This is frightening but inevitable, and the more we fight it and provide life support to these outdated forms of news delivery, the more it will hurt.

The appetite for news remains strong.    I predict cities will have just one television station and every newspaper will go from print to some form of paid online service.   If they haven’t done this already, all news organizations should shift priority to their websites.  There is nothing happening in print and on television that cannot be done online.    For their part, news consumers should determine which news sites are indispensible and be prepared to pay for them.   It is becoming clear that advertising can not do it alone.

State and local governments are running out of money and increasing the taxes of citizens who are also running out of money is no longer the answer.    The need for services is not going away, it is increasing.  Upstate New York in particular has multiple layers of government with no one at the helm willing to advocate himself out of a job.    We need a drastic pruning in the form of a metropolitan government, finally.

Law enforcement needs pruning too.   Long ago,  when I was a cub reporter assigned to a murder story for WTVH-TV, I asked a member of law enforcement how it was determined which agency responded in Onondaga County.   Who decided if it was State Police, the Sheriff’s Department or town or village police?  The answer?  Whichever agency takes the first phone call for help.  That’s ridiculous.  Now that we call 911, why do all these police agencies even exist?  Everyone of them has a Chief and a Deputy Chief and a First and Second deputy to the chief and you get the idea.   How can we afford this?

I wish I knew more about finance to make intelligent suggestions for the future, but I can only identify the problems.  One thing that must change is the 401K as a solution for retirement.   Through no fault of our own, we’ve all lost too much of the money we need to live out our years.   We did what we were told, read the prospectus and annual report and essentially threw darts at Funds that may as well have been slot machines.  We need to take Lady Luck and corrupt men like Bernie Madoff out of retirement planning.

Double digit percentage increases in college tuition and single digit increases in family income cannot continue, and the answer is not to boast that you provide financial aid for half of all your students when the other half who just miss the qualifying mark have to pay for it.    Saddling college graduates with a lifetime of student loans seems irresponsible and establishes as normal a borrowing mentality that is a big part of why our economy collapsed.  We have a U.S. President advocating a pay-as-you-go-economy and a higher education system that says “keep borrowing”.   We must alter the latter.

Our health care system needs a major overhaul which Hillary Clinton saw coming nearly 20 years ago but which was turned back by the “S” word.  S for Socialist.  I have many European friends from socialist countries who complain the system over there isn’t perfect, but I never hear them worry about seeing a doctor of their choice, or affording a prescription medicine.  It’s shameful that the greatest country in the world lands so consistently low on global rankings for affordable and accessible health care,  that I  wonder if we really are the greatest country in the world anymore.

Our society must change because we can no longer claim our system reliably churns out the very best of what is most important. We place beneath some small countries that many of our high school students can’t find on a map, in science, medicine, access to higher education,  technology, even something as obtuse as happiness.

Out with the old, in with the new, farewell to the Gaslight Era and hello to the Electric Age.  So long Second Gilded Age and welcome…..       When it all shakes down, what will we call our new society?  Post your suggestions below.

1. “Where’s my teleprompter?”

2. Says aaannnddd too many times to buy time while gathering thoughts.

3. Should fix the economy before fixing anything else.

4. Chose a harsh critic to be his V.P.

5. Willing to negotiate with terrorists.

6. Any enemy of Rush’s is an enemy of mine.

7. Spending money faster than it can be printed.  Submitted by Ken Temple.

8. He likes to smoke.  Submitted by Carson Metcalf.

9. He believes too much. Submitted by CNYer.

10. The Bailout encourages bad behavior. Submitted by Dr. Bill Dalton

Loved the answers everyone.  Thanks. Maureen

In the decades spanning the Great Depression of the 1930s to the recession of today, anyone who lost a job at one company had a good chance of finding the same job with another.  No more.  The job bleed which began in December 2007 and continued with the loss of 650,000 jobs last month began a change so complete, I don’t think we know it’s here yet.

I recall a dreadful image of the Tsunami of 2004.  A man sat alone on the beach as the waters pulled back to the horizon, then pushed quickly forward again.   From the vantage point of the person with the video camera high on a hill, it was clear the man would not survive as this was no ordinary wave, the one you can dive through to avoid getting pummeled as the water makes it’s final reach to the shore.  The wave of a tsunami is really no wave at all.  It’s a wall of sand and rock and shell and debris.  It’s solid as cement.

This solitary sole enjoying a contemplative  Sunday morning on the beach had no idea from his position low on the sand that he would be killed within moments.  He sat motionless and apparently comfortable until the very last minute when he attempted to get up and run.  The foaming mess consumed him immediately and he was gone.

I make it sound like the recession is going to kill us, and I don’t mean to.  But I think many people are going about this new reality in old ways; the Jobs Fairs, the resumes posted on online employment warehouses like monster.com.  In Paramus, New Jersey last week, ten people applied for each minimum wage job opening at the new Target store, and that included fired business executives willing to work the floors in the housewares department.  People are desperate, if conventional.

The jobless rate nationwide is 8.1 percent which doesn’t include the underemployed, like the aforementioned executive working the sales floor.  And if you include the number of people who have simply given up looking for work, the rate spikes to 11.3 percent and is expected to climb all year.

I think of the people I know who lost a job in one industry and opened their eyes in another.   A former WTVH-TV reporter became a flight attendant.  Another took a job in pharmaceutical sales.  When a nurse anesthetist friend of mine had a sudden hearing loss and could no longer hear the patient’s heartbeat, she got out of medicine and into hand-crafted jewelry for a fraction of the money and quadruple the satisfaction.  Yet another friend with an MBA opened up a pastry shop and became the pastry chef, though she knew she was in trouble when, in September at the peek of the financial mess on Wall Street, her customers abruptly stopped buying cookies.  My friend closed her pastry shop after Christmas and is now looking for the next thing in America, though she is French and her family would like her to return home where the economy is no better.

None of these people predicted they would go from Point A to Point B in the way they did and it wasn’t easy.  Nothing about this economy is easy.

Like the man on the beach who couldn’t see the wave until it hit him hard, the American workforce is lacerated and bleeding.   Jeff Bezos, CEO of amazon.com told Matt Lauer on the Today Show we will invent our way out of this recession with new “green” technology and renewable energy, and we’ll be stronger than ever.  There is nothing in our history to suggest otherwise.  Until that occurs, here’s to the brave who have already reinvented themselves.

The U.S. workforce is hemorrhaging jobs.  Since the first of the year 210,000 workers have been told the bad news.  Yet there is one sector of the economy that is expanding.  It’s the federal government which last year added 181,000 workers to the payroll.  Suddenly, government is cool.

Government jobs have something the private sector doesn’t have right now; expansion.  It’s not going anywhere,  and the benefits are stable and lasting.  Plus, some people believe that New York City with it’s dependence on Wall Street, has lost it’s luster and Washington is the place to be.

There’s another job that may begin to look appealing again, and that is the Roman Catholic Priest.  The Priesthood has been decimated in recent decades, by the Priest sex abuse scandal, and by the private sector which pays well, is socially rewarding and allows employees to be married.

Will this economy spur people to work for the government and in the church?  So far, there’s no indication that young men are lining up for the stability of the priesthood yet,  but the government is attracting new interest.   A recent job fair in Tuscon, Arizona  attracted 800 people looking for information about Border Patrol jobs.  That area of the government alone is expected to hire 11,000 workers this year alone.

In a challenging economy like this, work that had little interest  just two years ago has sudden new appeal.