Color my glasses

There was a story in the New York Times last week. And I tried to write about it. I did. Day after day.
But as you see, I was unable to. It just didn't help in the optimism end game.
The story, by Michael Luo, was about unemployment's impact on families, particularly children. It quoted studies that suggest children in families where the primary bread winner has become unemployed suffer emotionally--to the extent that they may be more likely to drop out of school, were 15 percent more likely to repeat a grade and may have lower earnings as an adult.
First reaction: I'm grateful, for my daughter's sake, neither of us has become unemployed. But on second thought: Has anyone studied what mega pay and hours cuts do to kids? When you add the unemployed to the underemployed, you're talking about a lot of people right now. If these things hold true, then Wall Street's greed and mismanagement are even more detestable than previously imagined.
Not only have large corporations taken their workers, wrung them out and cast them off, not only have they stolen huge amounts of taxpayer dollars, but now they are stealing from our children's futures as well. And on another front, an insidious group called "the Family" has worked its tentacles into US and world politics, using religion to defend the status quo. (More about this another time. But seriously, everyone should read The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power by Jeff Sharlet.)
Deep breath here. See what I mean? This line of angry thinking is not very useful to me at the moment. It is not helping me be an optimist.
So instead, I'll meditate today on another story I found, this time in Slate and Newsweek. In it, Daniel Gross argues that job recovery may be sooner rather than later. He cites big gains in productivity over the past few months--meaning fewer workers are doing more work. (Economists call this productivity. Another name would be under-paying your employees.) These gains will force companies to hire sooner, because there's only so much you can squeeze out of an employee before he or she collapses. "Hamsters can only run so fast on their treadmills," is the way he puts it.
This could be very good news for all of us.
Assuming the hiring takes place in the United States.
Sigh. There I go agin.