Letters: Jobless woes are getting old

CHARLES KENNY'S proposed solution to unemployment is interesting but shortsighted.

Not everyone collecting unemployment benefits is young. I know from personal experience.

In March of 2012, I was laid off from a position I'd held for 27 years. In the interim, I've landed exactly one temporary job and some very satisfying but unpaid volunteer work.

I find myself in the unenviable position of competing with people half my age for jobs that pay half of what I had been making. I am too young to retire, but still have bills to pay, and am all too aware that I am not alone.

Where is the solution for people like me?

Patricia Stringer

Philadelphia

In his long diatribe Charles Kenny describes our young people as "wastrel youth," "huddled masses," with poor education and language skill. He joyfully proclaims how good it would be if they were shipped overseas to work. Charles must be a real delight at family gatherings. I can see him now asking if his relatives finally sent their wastrel sons and daughters to Mexico. Wastrel according to the dictionary means a wasteful or good for nothing person.

Oddly enough that is the same attitude Mr. Lincoln had about his son Abe. Young Abe hated the fact that his father could rent him out as if he were property or an indentured servant. Still, young Abe Lincoln later saved the nation. Now it is very common for people who come here to work to stay here. My grandparents left from Belfast and never returned to Ireland. Can we afford to lose an Abe Lincoln to some other country?

Charles Kenny doesn't remember his own youth. He thinks of young people as cattle or some type of human stock to be trafficked across the globe. Sorry Professor Kenny but my children are not up for sale or trade or barter. Economic recovery should not be made by the selling off of our children.

Gerald O'Hare,

West Deptford

Re: "Gay marriage costs him his job." The mistake made by Holy Ghost Prep administrators was not their dismissal of homosexual teacher, Michael Griffin. It was that they hired him in the first place.

It's a mistake compounded by leaders of Catholic education institutions across America, who've dismissed the late Pope John Paul II's Apostolic Letter, which called them to require applicants for educator positions to make an oath of fidelity to church teachings on faith and morals. If school the president and principal had included this oath in the school's hiring policy, they may have spared Mr. Griffin his "shock" over alleged parallel employment policies for divorced and pro-contraceptive teachers.

Corporations all over America do not hire applicants who do not sign what essentially amounts to oaths to abide by their policies. Try joining Facebook, Twitter or eBay without clicking yes to their membership 'terms of agreement."

No one questions their employment or membership policies. Maybe the policies of Catholic education institutions would not be called into question if their administrators would stop dismissing the direction of the magisterium.

John Murray

Galloway