``Even in the midst of this so-called `economic recovery', the full-time employment rate for Americans under the age of 30 continues to fall. And incomes for that age group continue to fall as well. At the same time, young adults are dealing with record levels of student loan debt. As a result, more young Americans than ever are putting off getting married and having families, and more of them than ever are moving back in with their parents.
It can be absolutely soul crushing when you discover that the `bright future' that the system had been promising you for so many years turns out to be a lie...'' From: http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/30-statistics-about-americans-under-the-age-of-30-that-will-blow-your-mind --------- At the ripe age of 70 I can look back and remember exactly how it felt to discover this great lie. I had finished eight and half years of school and took nearly everything that had absolutely no job promise in art, literature, philosophy, anthropology, and a selection of intro science and math courses. I had just gotten married and needed a job and found one in construction. It was a union job in carpentry and I started learning a trade just as I could have eight years before when I would have been an experienced journeyman by that June, 1969. It was quite a feeling to sit on the back porch and clean up my tools, and relax after a brutal day in commerical construction in downtown San Francisco. Where had all the magic gone? I was twenty-six and whatever I had thought would be my life was more or less gone forever, although there still seemed to be a remote possibility of getting a teaching job in art somewhere. That pretty much disappeared a year later in the backroom studios of the De Young museum where I ran several night classes in beginning painting and drawing. The pay was so bad that only my day job as an orderly at the student hospital at UCB kept us in food and rent. My wife was finishing her BA and would continue on in grad school in about a year. I was lucky to get that construction job, but it was just too brutal to live with and still have any time that wasn't devoted to recovering energy enough to make it through the next day. On the bright side of construction, there was the enormous amount of knowledge and skill I accumulated in art and architecture, the raw making of the human world. I got lucky again in a minor university student services position but left that over politics... I never got out of those falls. I remained in the lower working class for the next thirty years. The only thing that kept me going was, and this is the irony of greatest bitterness and benefit, my education. I was lucky to find only jobs that I could definitely leave at 5:00p. After 5:00 I was free to be alive again. This turned out to be very rare among my friends outside the job. They were usually consumed with issues from work, whether they were on the clock or not. Almost all professional jobs require this kind of commitment. My ex for example spent a lot of time going to meetings after work, preparing reports and other work that circulated around the city planning dept. After 5:00 I played wife at home with the kid, which I must say was its own reward. The job ultimately transformed her and separated us long before more acute failures did in the whole marriage. Unless public policy is drastically overhauled, only a tiny minority of these kids are going to make it into the not so desparate upper reaches of the working class, which used to be called the middle class. And even if such an overhaul took place say in five years, this group will not get the benefit. Some other generation will. We're looking at the dead end kids. Again at a dinner I met several of this generation, two very lucky, one in question, and a third on the serious margins. There was an economics grad student, a chemistry post-doc, a neuroscience post-doc, and a typical rather bummy community college student. At a guess, the chemist and the economist will get jobs. The neuroscientist and community college kid will probably not get much. The only hope for the neuroscience post-doc is to pick up some new current lab technique that has applications in the bioscience industry. These jobs are hard to find. I don't see any future for the community college kid unless he lucks out in some unexpected field, a technical trade of some sort. It's extremely impolite to question people over their finances at dinner. But I brought up the extraordinary costs of education and the overwhelming student debt problem---in somewhat strident terms---which only resulted in a dead drop in table talk and a stunned silence. You would have thought I had just told the Aristocrats joke. The hostess mumbled something about happy thoughts and the table returned to the safety of meaningless chatter. I felt like the ancient mariner. Sullen, morose, demented, with the awareness I had seriously damaged the frail tracery of illusions that characterized bourgeois life. Something maybe in Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground Man. This was a short story I never really understood until much later... The reason for this deversion is simple. Nobody wants to know about this problem or consider what it means unless they are ensnared in this tangled horror with no exit. Except there is an exit, just not the one that might be expected... I'll clip this article and read it to one of my friends at the dinner, if he ever calls me again... CG _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
