I think what rubs a lot of Freepers the wrong way about these kind of articles is the obvious agenda behind them and the way the media takes these "down-on-their-luck" people and uses them for political purposes. Which essentially is to show how mean capitalism is and how nice it would be if we elected caring Communists like Hillary Clinton who would give these poor people socialized health care and other social safety nets that would "make everything better."
Now this particular article is not quite as atrocious as others in this genre, but it does pander to those liberals who think the solution is socialism, government housing, public welfare, socialized health care, etc., etc., etc., which is anathema to good conservatives.
Liberalism has produced several generations of grasshoppers who are now attacking the ants as "selfish" for having planned ahead.
Not that this guy in the article was necessarily a grasshopper. But there are some grasshoppers on this thread who are attacking the ants.
I think another dynamic here is that many people do not realize that as an employee, you are simply a commodity. Once the employer decides that a commodity is no longer needed, the commodity is gotten rid of. Many people have fallen into the trap of thinking that the employer is "mean" and that the discarded employee is a "victim."
I believe that too many people who are employees do not think in terms of themselves being a commodity. Many of them have been poisoned by nearly a century of socialist labor unions and feel that their employer "owes them a living." Not only that, but they feel that as they gain seniority, that their pay should automatically increase while their work decreases. This is not the right attitude to have as an employee.
An employee should always be thinking of how they can acquire skills to not only make them more valuable to their employer but will make them valuable to other employers as well. This is the way to make more money. Too many people take a job, get good at that particular job and then fall into a "comfort zone" where they feel that they can set the rest of their life on cruise control. Well life does not work that way. Those who put themselves on cruise control often are the most expendable employees.
There are also other ways that employees can protect themselves from being out of work. They can commit to saving a portion of their paycheck for savings and retirement (such as 401k). After several years of working, they should have accumulated enough assets to sustain a significant amount of time of being out of work. By the time they have worked 30 or 40 years, they should have enough assets accumulated to where they no longer "need a job" and simply work for the pleasure of it or for the goal of retiring in comfort as opposed to retiring to subsist.
Even if you are an employee in the working class, you can assure yourself of a comfortable retirement if you save 15% of your income throughout your working career. Yet those who helpfully point this simple truth out to others so that they do not make the mistakes as the man in this article, they are attacked by others as being uncaring, unsympathetic and whatnot. I suppose that if we were to respond to such as article by saying "Oh, that poor man. Isn't there some government program for him? It's the fault of George Bush and all those evil conservatives that he is in the situation he is in!" that we would then be perceived as caring and sympathetic to this man's plight.
I am liking you more and more. Well presented.
An easy way to do the 401K is to start low and have it taken from your check. Bump it up a % each enrollment period. When you get a raise add it on. That way it grows and you don't miss what you never had.
And I think another dynamic here is that many people do not realize that treating human beings as commodities is immoral, inhumane, and self-destructive in the long term.