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Monday night, Labor Day 2009, HBO carried a documentary on the final days before the closing of the Moraine, Ohio GM Plant. It was heart wrenching.

How do you sit there and watch people’s lives, as they have come to know it, end? Average, middle aged, American workers, with no clue, utterly shocked at what was happening to them. Watching each of the people they interviewed including some really tough-looking characters cry, was more than I could take. I was glad when it was over.

I was also struck at how few of them were more than high-school educated, and completely unprepared for life after auto work.

Then Tuesday morning, NPR carried a long report and the collapse of the wool market in Mongolia, and what it was doing to indigenous herders and farmers on ancient steppes in more than rural North Asia. Their way of life, too, was vanishing.

Did I feel as bad for them as my fellow citizens in Ohio? Well, I guess I did. If you go on the NPR website, you can see pictures of the herding community that was affected by the diversification in the cashmere marketplace, as well as the sheep and goats herders needed to sell in order to make ends meet, until there were no more sheep left to sell. Americans were no longer buying luxury sweaters and SUVs. Average people are hurt.

The similarities were too obvious to ignore. Economic dislocation will do that to communities. Is it any wonder that Mercury Marine workers changed their strategy to keep the company from leaving Fond du Lac?

My kids were born in Nicaragua, a country which is a competitor for cheap labor that has become too expensive in China. I spend a lot of time in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, which has tried to adjust to the end of copper mining and declining tourism. A large percentage of people living in the neighborhood that I work in are uncompetitive in the regional, much less, global workforce. We can’t cope with returning prisoners from the State’s correctional system. There is a joke about discouraged workers going around that they are neither discouraged, nor workers. See young men hanging out on the streets? They are not looking for jobs, and don’t look all that distressed about it.

The UWM Employment and Training Institute recently released a study that shows the jobs gap, the number of people making applications per job, is up to 25-1. Unemployment has doubled in the City to 12.3%. It’s almost irrational to be looking for a job if you are under-educated and living in the inner city of Milwaukee.

I would like to see a next round of stimulus money go into public sector jobs, training as a job, and non-profit hiring for public service. Waiting years for the “jobless” recovery to end and once again create jobs is no answer to today’s labor market.

I never thought I would ever say this, maybe its time to quit trying to do what can’t be done right now. Let’s create jobs in public employment so that we can hire off the streets, help people stabilize their lives and just start over.

Moraine, Mongolia, Marquette, Milwaukee. There have more in common than M. Dislocation means tragedy for some, opportunities for others. Given this context, it was astonishing to me that parents would keep their kids home instead of sending them to school where they might hear a message from President Obama that I wish the kids in the streets with nothing to do outside of our plant’s gates could hear. I wish the kids outside could have been brainwashed by “stay in school”. They didn’t. That’s the real tragedy.