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Milllennial Generation Feels Ignored by The One
Nice presidency you have there. Anyone you'd like to thank? Anyone at all? Does any group of people spring to mind? Sizable, stressed, jobless? Heavily in debt? Well-educated? Ring any bells?Hint: a lot of us volunteered for you, and not because we were excessively employed to begin with. The State of the Union may be improving. But the state of the Millennials is -- still pretty dire, actually. I know we are noted, as a generation, for our ability to complain. We have complained before. We are Generation Always Says We'll Quit Facebook But Still Hasn't. We complain on Twitter, on Facebook, via text, in person, on Tumblr. We are squeaky wheels. But where's our grease? We could stand a little grease right about now. And none is forthcoming. And this is really a problem. We are grotesquely unemployed. We waded bravely into the workforce waving extremely expensive sheets of paper that turned out to be almost meaningless. Nearly half of college graduates are working jobs that don't require four-year degrees. And those are the ones who are working at all! Don't worry - The One will save the middle class! The rest of us still paid too much money for educations at universities that did nothing much to improve our critical thinking skills, and several of whom turned out to be falsifying their test scores to appear more exclusive. The only thing college trained us to do was to drink lots of inexpensive beer quickly and uncomplainingly, which is useful given the likely state of our beer budgets in years to come. But we had hoped for more. Some things never change, but I still can't drink Miller High Life. We need him to be there for us. We were there for him. Who do you think got him this nice election? We are the ones who received all those creepy fundraising e-mails. And yes, we like the social issues. But we are hurting. We are lying awake at night stressed, staring up at the glow-in-the-dark stars that we put on our bedroom ceilings when we were eight and thought that the world was going to be our oyster. It needs to start looking more like an oyster and less like our parents' basement. And we were so good. Legends in their own minds. We never messed around. We never embraced 1970s fashion, or burned any draft cards or bras or -- anything but CDs of illegally downloaded music, really. We had nothing that could be remotely likened to a Woodstock. We have been carefully trained by our loving helicopter mothers and fathers to supply correct answers on any standardized test you can hand us, talk in complete sentences and maintain a firm grip on our social media presences. But the past few years have been a test of a totally non-standard kind. What do we do now? Grow up? And what has our hard work gotten us? Try the global warming industry. You helped build it. A lot of student loan debt. Stress. And -- that's about it. Not jobs. (I write this as someone with job-market survivor's guilt, but then again what I have is a job in the newspaper industry, which is a nicer way of saying that ten years from now I am certain to be unemployed.) Too bad you didn't believe Willard about creating jobs. Dopes. Last State of the Union, the President suggested the need to control the cost of college and deal with the more than a trillion dollars of student loan debt facing the country. And it's still not fixed? Imagine that! But it's not just the student loans. And staying on our parents' insurance was nice -- but what happens next? Hitting the snooze button on these bills won't fix the larger problem of what we are going to do with ourselves. The fact that we can't afford to pay them back now is a symptom of the problem, not the problem. Is that a light at the end of the tunnel, perhaps?  We have no idea how to handle this. We have tried listening to music. But Beyonce is not as reassuring as we would like.We understand your twenties are never easy. They are the point when all your confident When's start melting into If's. Sure, it's the economy. But for how much longer? We thought we would have more options than to be depressed because we do not have jobs or depressed because all our friends are getting married. According to the stress survey, the percentage of people who use unhealthy coping mechanisms like drinking away their stress and eating away their stress is lower than it used to be. But it ain't zero, either. We should have known that Hope was the most dangerous thing in Pandora's box. What are we going to do with the rest of our lives? Grow up? Posted by: Bobby 2013-02-16 |
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