Friday, October 14, 2011

Friday Rant: Generation Screwed


In my June 21st post, “$100,000 in Student Loan Debt, Can’t Find a Job,” I wrote about Leslie, the young recent graduate of a Masters program who stayed with my wife and me for a few days this past summer during her frustrating search for a job. During our conversations about her situation, Leslie bemoaned that her financial situation and her inability to secure decent employment despite her education was endangering her life’s goals of getting married, buying a house, starting a family and planning for retirement.

As I recounted in my last update on Leslie’s situation a couple of months ago, she had landed a temp position with a charitable organization and was optimistic that it would lead to something more permanent. Not so, unfortunately. Today Leslie is unemployed again. Because she lives in New York City she’s been spending a lot of her time recently attending the Occupy Wall Street protests, and I applaud her for that. She has also decided to join military to help pay off her student loans. This was a particularly agonizing decision for her, because like me she opposes America’s war policies. Leslie’s situation is, of course, hardly unique among the people of her generation, which is no doubt why the Occupy movement has caught on so quickly and spread like wildfire all over the country.

It’s ironic that my father’s generation, those referred to as the “Lost Generation” sandwiched between the so-called “Greatest Generation” and the Baby Boomers, were the ones who actually benefitted the most from the cheap oil era. Those Americans born from the mid-1920s to the early 1940s managed to miss being caught up in the carnage of World War Two and came of age during the greatest period of economic expansion ever witnessed in human history. For these fortunate individuals, peak oil and the impending end of economic growth did not arrive until they were well into their sunset years.

The Baby Boomers were nearly as lucky. Those born from the mid-1940s to the early 1960s grew up with the abundance that resulted from America’s postwar economic boom as cheap oil allowed America to build the car centric suburbs as we know them today. The middle class expanded rapidly and a majority of Americans began living the “American Dream” of a house, two cars, regular vacations, a good retirement and the promise that their children would have it even better than they did. Not until they approached retirement age did the cheap oil party end and the hangover began.

My generation, originally aptly called the 13th Generation, but later morphing into “Generation X,” came along just as the idyllic picture of the American Dream was beginning to fray around the edges. Those born from the 1960s to the early 1980s for the most part enjoyed the same abundance growing up as did the Baby Boomers, unless we were children of blue collar workers whose jobs began being exported overseas in the quest for globalization. For the first time since World War Two, the economic divide between those with a college education and those without began to widen, and working class Gen-X’ers were the first ones to feel it. For us the full blown crisis is now hitting as we enter middle age.

And finally, we come to the Millennials, also known as Generation Y. The oldest of the children born between the mid-1980s and the early 2000s from middle class families are the ones just now graduating from college with huge student loan debts only to find that they now face a jobs crisis even worse than the one that plagued the blue collar kids the generation before them. This is the generation that never had a chance to get started with life before the financial tsunami hit them.

From the time they were little children the Millennials have been told by everyone—their parents, their teachers, the media and even the politicians—that if they studied hard, didn’t make waves and got a good education that their reward would be the ability to live the same American Dream that their parents lived. The propaganda was so strongly instilled within them that many, usually with their parents’ blessing, were willing to take on an insane amount of debt in order to get stamped their ticket to the good life.

And now they are stuck. Like those blue collar kids a generation ago, the college age Generation Y’ers are learning that the game has fundamentally changed and the doors to the life they are seeking have been permanently barred. For what America is now experiencing is NOT just a routine downturn in the business cycle, but the beginning of a long era of economic contraction. The prosperity of the previous era that ran for approximately 60 years from the late-1940s to the first decade of the 21st century was a historical aberration enabled by a brief moment in which vast amounts of cheap oil fueled a boom that will never be seen again.

Given the damage that fossil fuel exploitation has wrought upon the natural world, I do not mourn the passing of our modern industrial civilization. Perhaps if we had used the blessings of modern technology to create a more egalitarian and sustainable society instead of just producing massive amounts of useless fucking junk for the maximum possible profit I might feel differently. In short, I do not deplore the Millennials being robbed of their chance to become middle class consumer zombies, but instead the fact that they have been repeatedly LIED to and sold down the river by the generations before them. EAT THE RICH, says the sign in the picture above. It could just as easily have read, EAT THE OLD.

So this is one Generation X-er who would like to apologize to the Millennials like Leslie, those young men and women of great expectations who have so cruelly had their hopes and dreams wrestled away from them by their thoughtless and greedy predecessors. For they are truly, Generation Screwed.

13 comments:

  1. Ah, another student of Straus and Howe. Their theory is always spot on. I remember when I first read "Generations" in the early 90s and really did not believe that my generation (13) would be forgotten and basically screwed. I did not believe we would always have to struggle in some way because of the sins of the elders. I believe now.

    Another good post! Thanks!

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  2. This is a fantastic analysis. I'll be sending the link to my two children who are in Generation Screwed.

    Thing is, this isn't news to them, and we've long been talking strategies about how best to navigate through the predicament they face.

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  3. My advice is to go where the money is- she will be given good training in the military, with her education she can pick a branch and will probably go into the officer candidate program- I don't see her future as being blown to bits somewhere, she might even be sent out for more education in the private university system, before too long.

    I understand youthful idealism and honor those who have it, but in this Great Recession, you can't let those ideals blind you to a real opportunity when it comes along- it may not visit you again.

    Good luck to Leslie.

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  4. Glad I found you. You will be a fun read, Bill, but I hope on occassion you will find something positive to throw at us.
    I don't see any "Profile" on your blog. Who the heck are you in real life?

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  5. Excellent post. You are right, this as much a generational protest as an economic one. The plight of these young people, which you define perfectly (para #7 – i.e. they did everything they were supposed to and yet are being punished for it), does not seem well-understood by most observers. There are no jobs for most of these kids, at least nothing that will allow them to lead normal lives and escape a life sentence of debt servitude. Their detractors chide them as lazy and irresponsible – this will only fuel their rage. And those in power cannot and will not help them, because wage destruction lies at the core of neoliberal economics. President Hopey-Changey and a bipartisan congress just passed three more trade agreements that will eat even more jobs.

    History has shown that a young, educated underclass is a dangerous thing to existing power structures. This thing is only beginning. And it is already turning violent. Darker days lie ahead.

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  6. @stonepost - Well, back on September 25th, I did blog about the local teacher's union in Nebraska who gave up a monetary benefit in order to buy new books for their students. But that is not normally the purpose of this blog, which is to puncture the MSM myth that recovery is "just around the corner."

    As for who I am...a frustrated writer and middle management drone who lost his faith in the system right around the time Chimpy Bush was reelected.

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  7. @Huey Lewis - definitely. Some doomers make the mistake of thinking the end will play out like a Hollywood movie. More likely, it will resemble a slow motion train wreck. These protests are merely the opening salvos of a catastrophic sea change.

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  8. Bill wrote "Perhaps if we had used the blessings of modern technology to create a more egaltarian and sustainable society instead of just producing massive amounts of useless fucking junk for the maximum possible profit I might feel differently. In short, I do not deplore the Millennials being robbed of their chance to become middle class consumer zombies, but instead the fact that they have been repeatedly LIED to and sold down the river by the generations before them. EAT THE RICH, says the sign in the picture above. It could just as easily have read, EAT THE OLD.

    So this is one Generation X-er who would like to apologize to the Millennials like Leslie, those young men and women of great expectations who have so cruelly had their hopes and dreams wrestled away from them by their thoughtless and greedy predecessors. For they are truly, Generation Screwed."


    Brilliant stuff Bill, can I add my Generation X (48 years old) apology to your apology.

    The above quote really sums up in a concise way exactly how I feel about our generation. I figured out peak oil when I was about 23 years old and it changed how I have lived my life. But for all those years I felt a terrible disconnect from and anger with our generation, because we grew up with the 73 and 79 oil crisis. We were old enough to remember Jimmy Carter's 1979 sweater speech. We should have known better but we swallowed the crap that Thatcher and Regan were spouting and sold out for the promise of money to buy lots of crap. And we threw away the chance to create a better world for those who came after us.

    Twenty five years ago when I started challenging people of our generation about future oil supplies they would always answer, it will not happen in my lifetime. How narccistic was that, that all that really mattered was our lifetime, that the past and the future did not matter, only our ability to keep buying crap for our lifetime. That all the people who had lived and all the people who ever would live were nothing compared to our right to continue buying crap right now.

    We should consider outselves very lucky if the 20 somethings don't yet hang us from lamposts. Another thing that really annoys me was how our generation indulged our kids and bought them all the crap they wanted, and gave them narcissitic ideas and allowed their manners to go to hell. They grew up in guilded cages, pumped full of madcap expectations and were told how fantastic and talented they were, from they could first suck a tit. And now we hand them this mess of a world. How cruel and perverse is that?

    Anyway brilliant work Bill, best yet.

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  9. @iwe - Thanks for the compliment!

    I was a little young to really remember the 1973 crisis, but 1979 scared the heck out of me. It should have served as a wake up call for all of us of every generation who were alive at the time. What fine, fine specimens we are.

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  10. You are without a doubt one of the most compassionate and aware members of Gen X - apology more than accepted from this Gen Y'er!

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  11. Bill Hicks..., You said it all very well. Generation Screwed. That pretty much says it all. Darker days do indeed lie ahead. This is only the begining. I have memories of my younger life. They seem like a dream now. A very distant dream at that.

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  12. I simply have no respect for old folks anymore. I do feel a twinge of guilt, but the simple fact is I and my wife will be the ones picking up the burden for their selfishness. It makes me very angry to think that my children could know poverty if I don't somehow manage to reverse 3 generations worth of laziness and economic squandering. The old ones are the ones who allowed licensing, removal of rights, the federal reserve, the NWO, NATO, state-enforced indoctrination, social security, water flouridation, the drug war, and all other manner of imperialistic murder to happen right under their noses. And they were fine with it, so long as I and my children paid for it.

    Here's the news, I will not. The seeds of greed were sown and they will die in poverty. It's that simple. If I have to, i'll go elsewhere and rough it. Better then perpetuating this crime calling itself a nation.

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  13. I'm considered a generation Xer at 36 years old and I certainly don't remember much of the 1970s (when I was in kindergarten you mean? oh yea I followed politics very intensely back then - NOT). The economy has never seemed all that good, a lot of generation Xers like me were just starting their careers in the last recession and got hammered by it. But it is way worse for the young kids now. People my age I think just barely slipped in while there was still time.

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