Including Mining and the Timber Industry in your statistics is what is known as “proofiness”, a common tactic amongst Lawyers, Republicans and Other Damned Liars who throw out numbers not entirely germane to the topic at hand to sway opinion through confusion. Mining has never been a big employer around here, and the Timber Industry (Logging) died, thanks in no small part to people moving here from New Jersey solely to shut down the way of life my family enjoyed here for four generations, twenty years ago.
As to education, as opposed to “re-training” (what are we, a bunch of monkeys or something?), I encourage any and all who have the opportunity to go to school – regardless that The Republicans and their cash-cows Big Business and The Banks want us all dumb as Tea Baggers, the better informed we all are the better life is for all of us. However, as a “displaced” Logger who went to school twenty years ago and earned three college degrees, I think it is a dis-service to the unemployed to push education in the misguided belief that there is something out there on the other side of a one year certificate or two year degree. This town is already chock-full of chefs, computer techs and auto repair-persons. All that education and a ten year run at a “professional” career has left me exactly where everyone else is… unemployed, and at fifty-five quite possibly unemployable.
