By Lee A. Daniels

Thursday the U.S. Senate refused to pass legislation extending unemployment benefits for jobless workers coming to the end of their regular benefits period. As a result, by the end of next week, more than a million jobless Americans will have lost their benefits this month.

It’s not clear when – or if — the Senate Democrats will try to bring unemployment extension legislation forward again.

Those are the unadorned facts.

But, while politicians and economists, cushioned by their regular paychecks, debate the merits of extending or not extending unemployment benefits, the 1.2 million jobless workers in this predicament face a different set of questions.

What will they do now? How will they pay the rent or the mortgage? Where will they go when they get evicted from their home or apartment? How will they make the payments for the car they need to get to job interviews? What about food? How will they pay for their children’s expenses?

The Senate delivered its answer Thursday night to these and other such questions that increasingly define the desperate world of millions in this country.

The Senate said: We don’t care.

Okay, I’ll grant you that perhaps the Senate said: We don’t care enough.

Or perhaps it said: The fiscal health of the country as a whole makes it impossible to help you jobless people.

Or perhaps they don’t even think about the jobless in real-people terms, but merely as an abstract number. A total of 15 million Americans are out of work, and 46 percent of them, or more than 6 million, haven’t been able to find a job for six months or longer.

Those are huge numbers. But they can slide into abstractness if you repeat them often enough without thinking of the individuals and families behind the numbers. Or if you compare those numbers to the trillions of dollars of America’s rapidly increasing deficit. What’s it matter that you’re casting a million or so people into the abyss when you can – on paper – slice billions of dollars off the deficit and proclaim yourself fiscally responsible.

I suggest that someone collect another set of unadorned facts – the facts of what is now happening to all those individuals and families the Senate has turned its back on in the name of fiscal prudence. Collect the facts of how many are being evicted from their homes, and how many are taking shelter on park benches, or under bridges, or in the subways and bus stations, or on the steps of churches or in the nooks and crannies of urban, suburban and rural environments. Perhaps those facts could be put on poster boards and placed along the corridors of the imposing Senate office buildings in the Capitol’s federal enclave and in the Senate chamber itself.

Then, the Senators at their leisure could compare the cost of the one with the cost of the other and perhaps get a clearer understanding of whether the action they took Thursday night is or is not morally defensible.

Lee A. Daniels is Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.; and Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline.