Unemployment, school debt, wars, budget deficits and a lack of funding for our infrastructure has put our young folks in quite a pickle. Seems like our country doesn’t want to have it’s kids educated nor do they want them to have any sort of solid footing as they get out into the world. The recent rate hike for new Student Loans is another example of our government not giving a shit about its youth. The young are what make our country. They make it strong with their ideas and ideals. To make things tougher for them is not the way to make this country great. There will be hard lessons learned in this country in the next 20 to 30 years. If we do not improve how we teach our children and if we do not teach them how to think. (Critically think I mean) We will be heading to a society where only a select few will have the knowledge and the ability to actually see what is happening in the world.(Who knows, not to sound too much like a conspiracy theorist, maybe that is what our government and the 1 per centers want). “We the people” will be an old ideal, a memory from another age.
From education institutions that just want the enrollment check written to these mega-corporations that don’t look for growth and just sit on their stockpiles of cash, we are heading for a world that will have an even bigger separation of class than it does now. The ironic part of all of this, it is that people are voting against their own self interest. People still believe in “trickle down economics” and “No Child left Behind”. Look around you people, it is not working. Companies want to bleed their workers dry while maintaining maximum profit and positive reports for their shareholders. The employee is just a commodity, easily replaced by someone ready to work for peanuts or replaced by someone from another country that won’t speak up about anything at all. I am not saying they are not allowed to make money, they are, but at what cost? The cost is the loss of self respect, the loss of working towards a meaningful existence where we can look at what we produce with pride and with respect. Talk about a “greater good” will get you laughed and sneered at in some circles, but it is a concept that is worth looking at. We are all in this together. We can make the world a better place if we just try and make our own country better in the process. We are the richest nation in the world, but we lag behind in many areas: Healthcare, Education and Social Welfare. We do however rate # 1 in military spending. I guess that is something. We have to build up our country again. We have to start making products here and we have to be able to look each other in the eye and be willing to help our fellow man. Until we get to the day when we can look past our own noses and look towards the common good of society, we will just be mindless husks running around, sipping our lattes , not caring that there are people out there who are trying but not making it. People have become clones of Gordon Gekko in Wall Street with attitudes of “I got mine, screw you”. It is frustrating, sickening and just saps the hope right out of me. We are being manipulated to think that there is no solution or that there is no hope out there. If we keep snuffing the candle that is our young folks, there just may be no hope left.
Things are not much better for folks my age (42 here). We have to compete in this cut throat job market and try to adapt to a world that is changing, not for the better, but for the worse. We are “commuters in cages” to quote Ian Anderson. We plod along in the hopes we scrape up enough savings to keep our house and not to have to eat dog food by the time we retire. We work longer hours for less wages. Our dollar buys less than it has ever. We are being shoveled bullshit down our throats by politicians who can about nothing but their next election. We are being molded by fear. Fear of losing your job, fear of terrorist, fear of not having any money when we do decided to quite this rat race. I am tired of being afraid. I am tired of feeling like I have no hope. I am sick of not doing anything about it. Feeling like I can do nothing about it. I am going to strive for change and I am going to start doing my part. Maybe someone will read this and think. Just think about how things are out there and how good they can be, if we just stick together and work for a common goal.
Thanks for reading,
Lefty
Mid-Life Crisis Task Force 