I caught up with a buddy of mine the other night, a young guy from Australia who has been in the United States for just a few months.

He works as a rehabilitation therapist. Day-to-day he treats people who have been injured or who have fallen sick and uses physio to help them get back on their feet, get back to their jobs, or just back into their homes.

As it tends to these days, our conversation soon turned to the state of the economy, the job cuts that were being announced, and the outlook for us and those we know.

A lot of the people I have met since arriving in the United States 18 months ago work at Microsoft, Boeing, and in the financial services industry. Others are contract IT specialists, and some have their own businesses, in human resources.

Many of these young people, who just a year ago were enjoying the fruits of their industries, have been hit hard by the economic downturn. Some of them have lost their jobs and are unable to find work. A young couple that lives in my building had to move out recently because he, a builder, got laid off.

I asked my mate how he was going. “More work than I can poke a stick at,” was his reply. It seems that the demand for services like rehab therapy is pretty inelastic.

So when I spoke with the new administrator of the Issaquah Nursing and Rehabilitation the other week, I was interested to hear her say that they are desperate for nurses, and that anyone who chose that career path through college would not be short on job options, anywhere in the world.

This scenario of strength and expansion in the public health industry contrasted so starkly with the picture of woe and hellfire we see in broadcasts from the computer, construction, automotive, finance, and retail industries.

There are a great many people in these industries either out of work or facing the prospect, who are now desperately looking for a new career path that will give them more stability.

As I was thinking what I would do in that same position, (which is to immediately begin training in an essential service like health care,) I began to imagine the beginning of a sustained and vital shift in not just our economy but our society. Out-of-work computer and banking people, redirecting their energy to fields like health care, is an interesting phenomenon to consider. To idealistic minds, it could be the beginning of a quiet revolution that America might need — one in which the provision of basic social services, like hospital treatment and health care services, is as expected and accessible as, say, a new line of your favorite Chevy or a Photoshop update.

I am seeing it happen already — personnel movement from those profit-making industries to industries of public service, where the demand is less elastic, the pay-packets smaller, but the work guaranteed. Even the recent cuts at Swedish Medical Center illustrate the point — it was the managers and executives that were let go, but the nurses and patient support personnel were considered indispensable.

It is not hard to see where this might take us, in terms of our priorities as a nation, and the priorities of other nations which so often take the lead from the United States.

Which is why the stimulus package, signed this week in Denver, Colo., is important not just to the economy of 2009/10, but to the society of the century.

For where the money goes, be it green-building or education or back into the automotive industry, that is where the people will go.

How this next generation of young Americans chooses to forge its living, is encouraged to forge its living, goes along way to defining what we did with this century.