Ranting to /dev/null

Not much scares me...

...but things like this article really do. It's a piece entitled "Falling Down" on Salon, and it's about the story of a family with two professional, college-educated parents who find themselves filing for food stamps and considering moving in with the in-laws. He lost his six-figure executive position when his company went bankrupt. She lost her Web-authoring job when her company was bought by another. Now he sells motorcycles no one buys and she is a "movie-house concession bitch". Neither of them made irresponsible career decisions (well, we always knew the Web was a bubble, but everyone was doing it...), and neither of them are slackers. They're just another statistic in the ranks of the underemployed.

This is the kind of thing that bothers me: finding that through no fault of my own, I am somehow unfit and/or unable to get where I want to go. And I've had some pretty acute experience with this kind of thing in the immediate past, believe you me.