Talkin Bout my Generation (Getting Screwed)

Hey all you people around my age (20’s–30’s), do you feel like you’re getting the short end of the stick?

College

Here we are entering adulthood. Many of us shouldering crushing student debt because we all bought into a narrative that college was the correct path to a meaningful and productive life. What has happened to the people who sold us that narrative? A lot of them got rich by inflating the cost of tuition by leaps and bounds, far outpacing inflation. Where has college gotten most of us? No job and crushing debt.

Defict

Not only are we in debt, but our government has saddled us with a possibly insurmountable mountain of a deficit. Do you want to know when it started? Right around the time we were all being born. Where did all of this money go? Beats me. It didn’t go to helping me pay for college.

Want to guess what those politicians are doing right now? Working together, making legislation to fix all these problems? Nope, when they are not writing petty letters to former rogue nations they are probably fundraising or voting to increase their own salary.

Planet

The same people who hiked up our tuition have also ravaged our planet. Rain forests disappearing, polar ice melting, fossil fuels burning, all at such a rate that our children’s children may not even realize they existed.

Healthcare

Our health care system is a Charlie Foxtrot (caution swears ahead!). Government meddling has turned it into an unwieldy behemoth of nonsensical regulation, inflated costs, and unsustainable practices. Do you really think Social Security will be around when we all turn 65?

Blame, blame, and more blame

Not everyone older than us is the enemy. Only the powerful ones.

They are the ones who are we are paying interest to. They are the ones who are then turning around and borrowing from us with no plans to pay it back. What happens when it comes time to collect? They don’t care they’ll all be dead. Just pass the problems on down the line. And, surprise! They left a nice trust fund so their kiddies are taken care of while the rest of us have to fend for ourselves.

It’s on us too

We were naive. We drank the kool-aid and got high on the pipe dream because it sounded nice. It sounded easy. Go to an All-American college. Get an All-American job. Buy an All-American automobile. And to do all this borrow a massive amount of All-American dollars.

From the way they pitched it, happiness seemed like something we might actually achieve rather than something we could pursue but never attain.

We never thought that our dream of happiness might be a wolf in the guise of a sheep.

We have been complicit in all of this. They told us to go to college and we did. They told us to borrow their money and pay them the interest and we did. They said, “can’t afford to buy our nice expensive car, that’s okay we’ll let you lease it. Oh, you also want to buy a house but the prices of new homes have also leaped beyond inflation? That’s okay there is this new thing called a subprime mortgage.”

And even if we did nothing, silence is just another form of consent.

What now?

I’m not trying to paint a bleak picture. Just calling it as I see it.

So I ask you, my family, friends, and fellow Americans, what are we doing about it?

We better come up with something fast or future generations won’t be born with silver spoons in their mouths but ticking time bombs.

Image Credit: Christopher Michel on Flickr