CantTrip [she/her]
No totally, you’re point is very clear and well- taken and the person you’re replying to must have had a recent bad convo with some chud using vehicular death as a minimization or something.
Just because someone “could” use vehicular death as a minimization of other things doesn’t mean that’s what you’re doing, and I think the users here aren’t so disingenuous that you can’t even raise your point.
Tons of violent road deaths, tons of trauma and broken families, and an unwillingness to examine it because greatly improving it would cost money.
I actually was in a similar situation as you. The absence was a bit shorter (3 years), and I did have a reference from my old job who knew about my situation (reconnecting with that person and updating them was really really hard, but very worth it). But I also had two possession misdemeanors from that time and was finishing up probation.
If you don’t want to go the flat out lie and make up jobs route, here are my tips:
-
Long absence: sick family member you have been caretaking that has recently passed, and you are soo ready to get back to full time work
-
No reference: hopefully you can reach out to someone, anyone, from that old job and let them know you’ve not worked since…due to >insert how honest you’re willing to be<. If not, your most charismatic friend/ family, and call them a volunteer coworker or something
-
Job hunting: my best luck was always on Craigslist. Look for smaller/ family companies, they usually have less hard processes and more of a “feel things out” approach. They also pay less. Oh well. Indeed and ZipRecruiter are more competitive and have an algorithm that figures out we’re fuck ups
-
Type of job: You might want to consider looking for jobs in areas where your past isn’t so crazy to people. If you’re a database manager, for instance, look for jobs in a mental health service network/ addiction recovery network. Then you can be more honest and tie it into why you want the job. This ultimately didn’t work for me, but it almost did a couple times.
Good luck!! I really thought I was never going to get a decent job again, but then it just… worked out one of those times. Luck+Tenacity. Granted, I’m still hourly when I should be salaried, but I have benefits (and hope). Wishing you the same.
I worked as a research assistant in adolescent medicine in college. My gut told me the first statement wasn’t even true.
Here’s a large study of adolescent stealing behaviors.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3671850/#!po=1.19048
Demographics of the sample are presented (Table 1). The overall prevalence of stealing was 15.2% (95%CI: 14.8–17.0). Twenty-nine students (0.72% of the entire sample, 4.6% of those who steal) endorsed stealing symptoms consistent with a DSM-IV diagnosis of kleptomania. Males were more likely to have reported stealing than were girls. African-Americans and Asian-Americans were more likely to have reported stealing. Those students in 9th grade were more likely to have stolen, and students living with two parents were less likely to have stolen (Table 1).
It’s self reported, which can be a rub if boys are more willing to admit to behaviors they see as masculine/ adventurous, and girls less so if they’ve internalized that the same behavior is “trashy”/ unfeminine. But n=3999 and it apparently tracks with other studies with differing methodologies. Kids are pretty honest about behaviors on surveys, actually, as a general rule.
If anyone is wondering, girls made up a smaller percentage of those in the “kleptomania- qualifying” group too.
So maybe boys are more likely to go through a stealing thing because their ancestors had to provide for their mates during/ after pregnancies. Just spit balling here.
[Anyone else find it weird that they write males in the bolded sentence and then girls?]
I know every situation is different but if your bosses went into your wallet while you were at lunch and took out 20 bucks every day, would you not call them out? Even if it meant some consequences? There’s something vital about standing up for yourself - they only get away so easy with it because its robbery with extra steps (a la Rick & Morty)
In 2016, we had Pat McCrory who was nationally infamous for the anti-trans and minimum wage bathroom bill and also coal ash corruption. It fucked up our state’s economy to the point where 2016 was a referendum on him, so Roy Cooper won the Gov., but Dems got wiped out otherwise.
Huh, so weird. It’s like actually material consequences as a result of an action campaign worked, but just repeating “they are bad. we are good” didn’t?
I think all this says is your interactions with homeless people have been limited - they are all complete strangers to you and you only talk to the most socially brazen ones beggjng (when you’re forced to) - and that’s just a function of your relatively high socioeconomic level.
If you were born into a poorer family, you’d have friends-of-friends and maybe even family who’ve dealt with homelessness and see a whole lot of “common ground”. Homelessness would have been a very real possibility during portions of your life, your parents thinking about how living in the car or at motels would work, or which people if any they could stomach to ask to move in with briefly.
In the last neighborhood I lived in, there was a man who lived in a few of my neighbors houses, in almost a rotation, with doing handy work in their yards as thinly veiled optics for everyone’s sake, and he was like just another neighbor in every way.
Anyway I was wrong before - your comment does say one more thing about you… you gotta redevelop your empathy! Even if your only interaction has been with “pushy” strangers, you should feel for that suffering, acknowledge how you don’t understand the path to that point very well because of the circumstances you were born into/some good luck, and feel the urge to fight and protect the most vulnerable among us. Your focus on your own inconvenience is a result of decades of capitalist propaganda that has been very effective on you.
Yeah there was more disgusting things but I think it’s prudent to stand firm against people who try to garner support for reactionary/ racist/ fascist notions by claiming it’s endemic to their experience of living in poverty. I see it too much… “calling out to attractive women is just how it is in my neighborhood lol you rich kid scolds wouldn’t last a day here.”
And the you see even true blue leftists rally around that because (a) the current American online left does trend college-educated white so there’s collective guilt and (b) the left purports to value lived experiences as valid in building a world-view
And yeah lived experiences are valid! But when that results in a claim that is reasonable for someone in a extremely powerful and well- equipped organization to use lethal force against someone in a systemically oppressed and brutalized community because of a knife… no no no no no