It’s not that the Hartford Business Journal newsroom is Hell on Earth.
If you’re used to being screamed at, and seeing your stories ripped up and flung in the air, and crazed editors suggesting that your opinion columns are on the level of bar-stool chatter, then working at HBJ is just fine.
The big sign above the newsroom door says, “Be Warned all Ye Who Enter Here,” which seems fair warning to sensitive artistes who think business journalism is sort of like attending a writer’s workshop for poets and novelists.
That’s really how all the world should be. None of this nonsense about us all being one big happy family. Different strokes for different folks. Niche marketing for the businesses. Selective shopping by the rich, the poor and the muddy middle class.
Is the featured $150 special at that cute little restaurant on the corner, “pigeon thymus l’orange?” Perhaps that isn’t the place for you. No harm done.
Where we don’t seem to be able to come to terms with selectivity is in our choice of states in which to live. Whether it be Connecticut, Colorado or California, or Massachusetts, Michigan and Maine, or Illinois, Indiana or Idaho, at least in theory, each state welcomes us in with no warnings or suggestions about what it means to settle down in one place or another.
On the plus side, of course, New Hampshire and Florida and Texas and a few fellow no-income-tax states don’t waste much time letting folks know about that. Every state will tout (or make up) economic development messages to trick you into coming. But, what about leaving?
One of the great strengths of America is the mobility and flexibility of a workforce that is able to identify the cues and move to where it might be appropriate. North Dakota, for instance, long a victim (if “victim” is the appropriate term) of population loss, is welcoming the boys back by the thousands, as the oil/mining/natural resources support system picks up steam, or oil, or gas, or something like that.
Where the system bogs down tends to be the states with the best “safety net,” with a super-sensitivity to racial harmony, with a progressive, lefty instinct to believe that the poor will always be with us.
When things are going badly in such places, not only don’t these jurisdictions put out a warning sign, they goose up the enticements to stay — and to invite the rest of your family in for a bad time.
We saw an example of it in Connecticut, where the reaction to having the third-highest unemployment rate in the nation for Hispanics was the rending of social-service garments and the need for “school reform.”
What’s never going to be asked is how on Earth a fairly prosperous state in the Northeast can be fostering some sort of dark conspiracy against Hispanic workers — with worse unemployment rates that Texas and New Mexico and other less welfare-friendly jurisdictions?
Connecticut offers an environment with constipated zoning and environmental laws, making it less appealing to major homebuilders that are often a major source for Hispanic hiring.
Connecticut has long ago chased out the low-end manufacturing that provide yet another option for some low-skill Hispanic workers — and, for that matter, blue-collar whites as well.
There is evidence to suggest that, at least for the current generation of employable Hispanics, the answer may be, get out. Move somewhere more appropriate to your skills and best interests.
An unemployment rate of about 17 percent for Hispanics in Connecticut? Maybe that’s not so bad. Stay and wait for “school reform.”
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
