Your G-g-g-eneration

Matt Bors really struck home for me with this one, both for the cartoon itself and within a context of his recent work.

Bors has become an ardent champion of Millennials, of which he is at the leading edge, having been born in 1983, two years into the demographic. On my 33rd birthday, as it happens.

We used to talk about the "Generation Gap" between my group and our parents, and while technology has shortened the intervals between those breaks, there is nothing new about young people kicking back against the previous generation.

It's part of, as the Stones said, "doing things I used to do, they think are new."

Now, for the record, "Baby Boomers" and "Gen X" and "Millennials" are just bogus marketing concepts that you shouldn't take seriously.

Still, younger folks should kick back against their elders.

In fact, shame on them if they don't. It's part of establishing yourself in the world.

However, at some point, the roles must be passed along. The young become adults and it becomes time for them to take the wheel.

But, while the grand eternal truth of generational rivalry persists, times do change and you're a damn fool to think it's all seamless.

Here's something I shared with teachers back in 1993 that is worth sharing again:

Cuomo was right, and right far beyond the immediate perils he cited a quarter century ago, when the first Millennials were just reaching puberty.

John Deering skips over both Gen X and the Millennials with this grim panel.

I've heard people my age say that the duck-and-cover drills scared them, but the only time it seemed real was during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the rest of the time, at least to me, it was pretty theoretical.

Kids today have seen the news and they know that it's entirely possible that someone could burst into their schools and slaughter them.

That's nothing to do with a "Generation Gap." It's simply the world we've given them.

We're to blame for, beginning in the late '70s, catering to a "Silent Majority" that included a selfish, paranoid, anarchistic element.

That blame should be understood, however, to have involved an element of deceit: Had Nixon's ratf*ckers not successfully torpedoed Ed Muskie's run for the presidency, for instance, we might be living in a very different world.

There are a million little junctures where things might have gone otherwise.

And didn't.

We shouldn't have gone into Vietnam, for that matter. Or Santo Domingo. Or any number of places that, in the years after WWII, we poked our noses into.

Before, I would note, the Baby Boomers were old enough to vote.

Well, whatever.

Lenny Bruce said, “The 'what should be' never did exist, but people keep trying to live up to it. There is no 'what should be,' there is only what is.” 

And what Bors describes is, indeed, a return to normalcy.

At which point the older generation turns to the younger and asks, "So what's your plan?"

 

As Pat Bagley points out, the economy has been hosed to the point where you may have other things on your mind.

Those of us who did not major in business, engineering or science had no greater job prospects a half century ago than the current crop of liberal arts majors, but we had less astonishing student debt and, as Pat points out about this cartoon, "I remember working part time while going to college and being able to cover living costs, including rent, with a bit left over. Can't do that today. What's changed?"

That's a philosophically interesting question because it can be answered, and because what's changed in our economy could be fixed, particularly if we join the Parkland Kids in stirring up a new group of voters.

Because here's a large part of what's changed:

The plutocrats are not even trying to hide.

Matt Wuerker puts Paul Ryan's legacy in focus: He got as much of his Ayn Rand-inspired policies in place as he could, at whatever cost to the economy, and then pulled up his pants and left.

There's a lot of economic inequity, both in the grander system and at the do-you-want-fries-with-that level, that could be reversed over the next decade, if enough voters rose up and demanded it.

And I suggested a decade because, as Nick Anderson suggests, some of the damage is long-term and is more hidden, and you won't get a sudden, Teddy Roosevelt-style turn-around of that by simply changing who controls the House in 2018.

Or who sits in the White House in 2020, though both changes are necessary before anything will change.

And while it would be good, and I think is necessary for the future of our country, to straighten out the oligarchic abuses and to make the economy work for everyone, we're still going to have to deal with, as Matt Bors noted, our "normalcy."

 

Letting in more refugees could happen quickly, or, at least, relatively quickly. As Matt Davies notes, it's basically one man's policy.

Though it would be hard to change our xenophobic, hard-hearted current policy, even with a sympathetic Congress, with that one man holding the veto pen.

Meanwhile, Assad continues to slaughter civilians who, it should be pointed out, are home in Syria, not waiting for clearance in refugee camps.

Do we just sit back and let it happen?

You can't claim the moral high ground unless you have a moral answer to that. We can't intervene everywhere, but I think the Pottery Barn rule remains in place.

Or do we run away like little kids who've put a baseball through the neighbor's window? 

As Eldridge Cleaver said, "There is no more neutrality in the world. You either have to be part of the solution, or you’re going to be part of the problem."

So what should we do about it?

And, don't worry, we can deal with the domestic stuff, too.

 

 

 

Comments

[Brent]

I don't think you need philosophy to work out why student debt shot up... I went to school during the period when the government here in Ontario cut funding to post secondary and removed the limits on increases to tuition. My tuition started out as a token amount... about the same as books. Paying for school for a term was dependent on covering food and rent, which were much larger costs. By the end, tuition was the the largest cost... food+rent would have been more at that time, but since tuition was going up at 10% a year, it was doubling about every 7 years, and that was more than 20 years ago.

Rent hasn't exactly gone down either... it was stagnant back then, but in the last decade it's gone up a lot in the area.
Plus they've rezoned the area around the university to high density, and now most of the housing near the university is in these new expensive apartments where they pack 5 to a unit. Which students seem to be happily doing (because they're still building more), probably because it's nothing next to their tuition now... it's the old sales gimmick, where you can push expensive add-ons when the person is already committed to spending a lot of money, because they feel cheap in comparison.

You might be interested in this Mark Rosenfelder's take on the move from capitalism to robber capitalism/rentier aristocracy.

https://zompist.wordpress.com/2018/02/23/robber-capitalism/

[Steve]

"Had Nixon's ratf*ckers not successfully torpedoed Ed Muskie's run for the presidency, for instance, we might be living in a very different world."

Thank you for that, I rarely see this referenced. In my early politically formative years, what Nixon's crew did to Ed Muskie, and more specifically to his wife, struck me as so vile that I haven't trusted the Republican Party since. Not that they tried to reform themselves after that with such notables as Lee Atwater, Karl Rove, and Roger Stone tied to the party.

[Woodrowfan]

not to mention Nixon sabotaging a peace treaty to get us out of Vietnam in 1968.