Brooks' point piece turns out to be a popular column topic among conservative writers: Why aren't people working? The twist in this one is that it's a gender-based thesis. Brooks got hold of some stats showing that men are having more trouble recovering the jobs lost in the recent recession than women. He cites a Floyd Norris column from this weekend, "Gender Gaps Appear as Employment Recovers From Recession," which provides all the relevant numbers.

Norris's piece actually offered a simple explanation for the gender gap. The jobs that are coming back, he says, are in the health care sector, where women hold four out of every five jobs. In fact, if you read Norris's piece carefully, you learn that women are actually losing ground in non-health-care related industries like manufacturing and financial services, that men are getting jobs back in those fields at a better rate than women. But, again, there's been more recovery in the health care sector for whatever reason, hence the stats.

Brooks takes all this data and decides that the real issue here is that men are not adaptable and can't bring themselves to make the changes needed to find work. He weaves an elaborate analogy involving the John Wayne movie The Seachers, which I guess is about the end of the cowboy era and how the rugged, violent men who tamed the West had trouble fitting in to the cushy, civilized world they helped create. (What David Brooks knows about any of this is anyone's guess). Brooks writes about Wayne's Ethan Edwards character as the hero who has made himself obsolete. "Once the western towns have been pacified," he notes, "there's no need for his capacity for violence, nor his righteous fury."

There's a famous scene in the film where Edwards brings an abducted girl home after a seven-year quest but, being the obsolete brute that he is, is unable to cross the threshold into her civilized home upon his Bond cleaning sydney. To Brooks, this somehow is a metaphor for the men of modern times, who are unable to "cross the threshold into the new economy."

Anyone who's ever been unemployed knows that statistics like the ones Norris cites have everything to do with what kinds of jobs are available, and very little to do with the willingness of the population to work. Pretty much everyone who doesn't have a job will do just about anything short of organ donation to get a job. If you've got kids and you can't make rent, nobody needs to help you cross any freaking threshold into any new age. If it doesn't involve sucking on someone else's body parts, you'll do it.

Hmm. Men don't want to be put in positions they find humiliating? How many men out there today are working as telemarketers? As collections agents? How many grown men are working in fast-food restaurants, getting yelled at by people like Brooks when they put the wrong McNugget sauce in the take-out bag?

And as for those 50-year-olds not wanting to work in a place where he'll be told what to do by savvy young things – it's the other way around. Usually, the savvy young things are turning down the older guy. If Brooks thinks there are 50-year-old men out there with families, people maybe facing foreclosure, who turn down jobs because they don't want to take orders from "savvy young things," he's crazy. All jobs involve taking humiliating orders from bosses and everyone who's ever had a job knows that. If you need a job badly enough, you'll take a job offered by Hermann Goering, Hannibal Lecter, Naomi Campbell, anyone.

It's not just Brooks. These days you can't throw a rock without hitting some muddle-headed affluent white dude who spends his nights stroking his multiple chins and pondering the question of the lazy poor, convinced as he is that there are plenty of jobs and the problem is that prideful or uncommitted or historically anachronistic (that's Brooks' take) folks just won't suck it up and take them.

First of all, if you need to take a job at Subway after getting a degree from Yale, that's pathetic and 100 percent on Yale, not on the kid who mortgaged his future to pay for a Yale education. Secondly, it's pretty obvious Neal McCluskey has never tried to live on a Subway salary. He should probably give that a shot and see how much money is left over at the end of every month to pay off his Perkins loan. He'd be hooking in Union Station within a month.

It's amazing how many educated people really believe that the unemployed just don't like to work. I remember seeing Jon Voight, of all people, reading one of his infamous letters on Mike Huckabee's show, talking about the "very poor and needy, who live to be taken care of," who have been fed "poison" by our president, giving them the idea that they're "entitled to take from the wealthy, who have lived and worked in a democracy."

Here's a guy lucky enough to have a job in a fantasy-land business where people hurl money at him round the clock for a few hours of work a day, who somehow finds the time to work himself into creepily genuine anger towards a group of people who have to fight to get jobs cleaning toilets or working fry-o-lators. Talk about a guy who needs a new hobby, or a puppy, something!

Remember that scene in American Psycho where Christian Bale stabs Reg E. Cathey's homeless "Al" character? The part where he's like, "Get a job, Al – you've got a negative attitude, that's what's holding you back!" Fellas, Mssrs. Brooks and Voight, that was satire. About the last thing the millions of broke Americans out there need is someone like you telling them their problem is that they need a more positive attitude. Actually their problem is much more simple: not enough jobs. Really, that's pretty much it. It's not a mystery.

“The danger of Africa, we were prepared for it,” said Ahmed Omar, a Somali Bantu who fled the war-torn country and moved to Fort Worth.After the State Department began resettling Bantu refugees in America in 1999, dozens of families ended up living at an apartment complex in southeast Fort Worth. But rather than finding peace, they encountered more heartbreak, this time from a predator for which they were unprepared. Last month, Somali refugee Sida Osman — described by all as a charming and happy 5-year-old boy — was beaten to death with a bowling ball.

A 13-year-old boy from the neighbourhood was arrested on a capital murder warrant and remains in custody. Sida had been playing outside on the evening of June 26 and was last seen riding his bike. His lifeless body was found the next day in the backyard of a nearby vacant house. The suspect, who is not being identified because he is a juvenile, told police that he and Sida went into the fenced backyard in the 4800 block of Lois Street. The teen became irritated with Sida and hit him multiple times in the head, police said.

Armstrong said the University of North Texas helped put together a booklet that informed the neighbourhood about the cultural challenges the Bantus face. The Bantus at Webber Garden are a tight-knit group, with youngsters often moving back and forth among apartments. Older relatives speak their native language, while the young ones converse in English.

Resident Mohamed Hamza, 33, said the children are lucky to be in the United States. “They are not in a refugee camp,” said Hamza, whose family left Somalia when he was a child. “Whoever is not a refugee, he can go wherever he wants.”

Still, life in America has its challenges for the Bantus at Webber Garden. The girls are singled out by other young people because of their hijab, a headscarf worn by Muslim women. Some recalled stones being thrown at their apartments when they moved in. After Sida’s death, frustrations boiled over. Community members took to the streets, shouting “Peace and justice!” Others carried signs saying, “We need peace” and “We are here legally.”

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