Here’s a jobs program from a different culture for you. Perhaps it can be retrofitted for Vermont.

Meaningless background: When I was about thirteen, my family moved into a house we’d built a couple miles out of town, which technically made us citizens of Paint Lick, Kentucky. Much as its fun to drop that name as my hometown to yankees, my hometown was really Berea (which I wouldn’t exactly call a groovy place, but it did have a lot of uniquely positive and negative qualities, all of which were tied up around Berea College, a Christian college founded way back when as an abolitionist school servicing poor appalachian mountain youth).

Anyway. History lesson over, as it really has nothing to do with the one-liner I wanted to share. I went to high school about 12 miles away, and there were only a few other Bereans in my 9th grade citizenship class. One was a guy named Charles – a rather intimidatingly large fellow (tall, broad shouldered, round), real working class Kentucky stock with the dry wit and innate sense of comic timing typical to a lot of folks like him back home.

One day, the teacher posed a question to the class: “What’s somebody supposed to do if they lose their job and they have no education, no real professional skills, no money, no family resources to fall back on, and no prospects?”

Charles, with that comic timing gene fully engaged, took a breath during the all-too-typical silence in the class and responded into the vacuum; “in Berea, he opens up a church.”

I dunno. Maybe you had to be there, or maybe you have to be a southerner, but I swear to god I’m still laughing at that.