JOSEPH: People have to reconsider how they live and regions have to reconsider how to make themselves economically viable in a recession. Things will change for the better, but we have to bring new ideas to the table. That’s exactly what these residents are doing.

FRANK: Come on now most everyone that worked for DHL grew up on a farm or had a garden when they were growing up. It’s a good ideal to bring green businesses into the area but we all need to do a lot of changing and I don’t think growing a few vegetables is going to help much. Lets all stop driving our big SUVs and DHL employees have a bunch of them. Because the were spoiled for such a long time…

GENERATION LAZY & DUMB: DHL employees were spoiled for a long time? Are you kidding? I worked there while I was in high school. The people got paid like peasants and drove whatever car they could afford. I don’t know where you’re getting that they all drove SUVs…

Also, for an interesting glimpse into DHL work culture, check out this DHL News and Gossip Jobs Forum. Here’s a post from Jobless in Phoenix:

I KNOW I was meeting expectations. I had excellent reviews every year….Even the few who are left are complaining now about the overload of work, and they’ve changed everyones hours…. There are layoffs all over the US. They were even trying to get us to work with the lights off last year to cut back on the electricity to save money…. which we did… I have lots of friends who are still there. They are also in fear of losing their jobs.

Reuters is running a story on Wilmington, Ohio, where the recession has hit especially hard.

Unemployment in this small U.S. town has quadrupled in the past 16 months, but worse is to come as thousands of unemployed workers run out of severance money and benefits.

“Things are going to get tighter around here toward the end of the year,” said David Raizk, mayor of this town of 12,000 in southwestern Ohio. “As benefits run out we’re going to see a greater and greater dependence on the aid that’s available…”

…the local unemployment rate jumped over 14 percent in the wake of DHL’s announcement last November that it would leave the U.S. domestic market altogether with the loss of 9,500 jobs, many of them in Wilmington…

“When DHL came here we felt like we had the world by the horns,” said Mark Daley, 50, a pilot furloughed in July by ABX Air, which handles some international flights for DHL. “We had a new owner with deep pockets who knew what they were doing.”

Now, Daley may lose his home.

These days, every burg in America’s got its own Flickr pool, a collection of photos uploaded by residents. That allows for instant visual access to people and places that otherwise might have remained folded into the abstraction of small-town misery. Click here for images of Wilmington.

And if you missed the “60 Minutes” piece on Wilmington last January, here it is.