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Help Wanted

Whenever people I care about are laid off or fired, I try to assure them that what they do is not who they are.

"You are not your job," I insist. "You are more than your occupation."

It's true, but I'm not sure it's honest.

We know our worth as human beings never should be measured solely by how we earn our money, but many of us play that game. In our hearts, we may agree with philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin that we are not human beings having a spiritual experience, but spiritual beings having a human experience. In our heads, however, where doubts churn and flaws fester, we are first and foremost what we do for a living. And we apply that same test to every adult we meet.

Surely, those of us lucky enough to be employed know we wouldn't feel the same about the world or our places in it if we didn't have job titles pinned to our names. Imagine if your reason for leaving the house each morning were wiped away in an instant. One minute, you're somebody. The next minute, you're not. That's how it feels, anyway.

On Sunday, The Plain Dealer launched a periodic series, titled "Help Wanted." Writer Tony Brown drew on reporters' interviews with 88 unemployed men and women to write the lead story about the lives of the recently unemployed.

On Cleveland.com, the talents of Dale Omori, Lynn Ischay, David Andersen and Jon Fobes produced video interviews with the same people. They live in northeastern Ohio, but they speak for unemployed Americans in every region of this country.

The interviews, each more gripping than the next, illustrate a new truth about America: For all our diversity, we never have seemed so similar. These men and women, stripped of identities defined by occupation, sound hauntingly alike.

I thought I was protected. ... I thought I was going to be offered a contract. ... I thought I was going to a meeting. ... I thought I was driving to work, but then my cell phone rang.

I have three children ... a daughter in college ... a wife ... a newborn son ... a husband who's unemployed.

I want to work. ... I want to work. ...I want to work.

There is comfort in knowing you're not the only one, says Lydia Esparra, who lost her job as a TV anchor and reporter.

"So many other people are on the same boat.

I go to church, and I'm with the guy sitting next to me at choir, and he's been laid off. He's a teacher. You go out to a restaurant, and the gal across the table that you know was laid off. You go to a family function, and there's, like, four or five people laid off at the table where you're having dinner together. You feel like you're on the Titanic, but you kind of got off ahead of time because you know the ship is still sinking."

"It's an equal-opportunity recession," Brown writes. And so the introductory video for "Help Wanted" starts with the guy who used to work in shipping and receiving and then moves on to the exercise director, the corporate travel consultant, the senior manager for Kaiser Permanente, the senior regulatory quality specialist. And so on.

The interviews reveal fear and anger, despair and hope, uncertainty and brazenness — sometimes all in the same person.

"Trying to pay a little bit of this bill, a little bit of that bill," says Tommas Ventura as he holds his little girl in his right arm. "There ain't no paying the whole bill off now. (I) kind of had to borrow money from family. It gets me real mad. So they're giving them money, but yet these guys are flying in on private planes, and these people from the banks (are) having parties. Like, I don't know, I think it could have been done better. Your kid brings home an F on his report card; you take him out for dinner?"

In the next breath, Ventura echoes the will of so many others, assuring whoever's listening that he's all about work.

"I'm not a young kid playing. I've got a family to support. And I can learn anything. As long as you teach me, I can learn it."

Over the next coming year, The Plain Dealer will travel with these men and women whose lives experienced an earthquake without warning. We don't know where they're going to end up, and we don't know how long it will take them to get there.

What we do know, from talking to them and watching their videos, is that all of them are more than the jobs they used to have.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and the author of two books from Random House: "Life Happens" and "... and His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.