I agree with your post.

However, here's some additional thinking about jobs disappearing overseas. If those jobs (low-skill manufacturing jobs, many of them) were to come home, the cost of our goods would go up.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. But it's true. A factory worker in Kansas (or Ohio or Kentucky) would need to make $10 or $12 per hour just to eat and live with five housemates. That factory worker would need to make $15 to $20 to have any kind of stable decent life.

So imagine the cost of a shirt, pair of pants, a lawnmower, a toaster, a popcorn popper, a TV, all the stuff of modern life, all doubling overnight. Maybe tripling. Can you hear the whining and moaning all the way to the housetops?

Would you buy the twice-the-price American version? Or the cheap Chinese knockoff at Wal-Mart? What if you're on a fixed income? What if you're a student? How many of us would REALLY buy that item for double the price?

Imagine we all come to our senses and say "Of course, I'll do the patriotic thing and buy the twice-the-price American toaster, to keep that factory running in Lexington, Atlanta, or Denver." OK, it wouldn't really happen, but just imagine.

That would mean you could buy the toaster but not the coffeepot. The lawnmower but not the popcorn popper. They all cost twice as much, remember?

We'd have a lot less stuff. The neverending "engine" of the American consumer can't just keep going, even if all those offshore jobs came home. And what's to prevent international companies from making the coffeepot in China and selling it here for half price? Do we start a trade embargo with China? Not a good idea since they hold our debt. We're stuck.

The "stuff" explosion is an illusion. We can't keep it up.

... who is eleven, spent nearly an hour at Home Depot looking at weed whackers and lawn mowers. It's all about the machinery, and the possibility that HE might be able to drive it. Those riding mowers, with the seats and the steering wheels that look like cars... irresistible.

Out the window when we drive now, he counts sports cars (we drive a boring dented Jeep). Ferrari, Mustang, all sorts. He can tell me how many of each we've seen by the end of a trip to the hardware store.

Thanks.

... That very American of states, full of people who speak Spanish and yet whose families have been here for many hundreds of years.

Santa Fe? Taos? Albuquerque? Beautiful, fantastic places, all within the borders of our own U S of A, full of weird pronunciations that don't obey the rules in English.

Can you imagine? The scandalousness of it all? Who Knew?

I'm reminded of the old Steve Martin routine about being in Paris, where "These people don't have the courtesy to speak English!"

My son is 11 now, and I've been down this road. I'm still on it, just a few years ahead of you.

I can tell you the specific details of my son, but they don't really matter. What matters is for you to keep trying, keep searching, and ignore the trolls.

My son takes meds. But as many have posted here, I don't know ANYONE who has given their child psychiatric medications lightly or easily. I don't know that they work for every kid who is like this, but don't rule them out. My attitude was, we'll try. Hell, I would have tried daily handstands and singing the national anthem if I'd thought it would help. The meds did help, tremendously.

No, your parenting didn't cause this. No, going to church won't help. Keep searching for good psychologists and psychiatrists who can help. For me, I found a multidisciplinary clinic (psychology, psychiatry, and extremely detailed educational testing for learning disabilities) that helped. We have a tutor outside school to supplement public school, based on what we learned from this clinic.

Good luck. Stay strong. You're doing a good job.

Who's gonna fund it?

I'm in Oregon, in the middle of one of the worst areas of unemployment in the nation. My next-door-neighbor just lost his job. We live in a comfortable middle-class suburb with great schools, lawns, sidewalks, fenced yards, dogs, and kids playing in the street. This is, in theory, where people are supposed to arrive when they achieve a modicum of stability in their lives.

My neighbor did shiftwork maintenance on extremely high-tech machinery in a wafer fab (silicon wafer factory). He knows that wafer fab work is disappearing overseas faster than you can say "China," so he's trying to retrain. He's thought about nursing, after so many years of layoffs and threatened layoffs in high tech.

The trouble is that our local community college is bursting at the seams in every program, every class. Overfull. Three people for every one open spot in anything. All the nursing prerequisite classes are full. They told him to come back in the fall for health care classes. So between now and September, he's supposed to live on dwindling unemployment, hunt for a job he won't find, and hope like hell he can get into school.

Retraining costs money. Lots of money. Not just for today's mid-career layoff victims, but for today's 18-year-olds, and tomorrow's, and the year after that.

How are we going to fund it? Who is going to fund it? And by fund it, it doesn't just mean lowering tuition or offering financial aid at existing state universities and community colleges. It means expanding capacity (buildings, labs, professors, equipment, computers, libraries, child care centers, and so on). This is not cheap.

I'm not saying it shouldn't be done. But I'd like to see anyone come up with a viable idea for public funding at state universities and community colleges.