I have a twenty-year-old son and an eighteen-year-old daughter, and among their friends are some of the finest people I know. Their stoicism, their grace, their humour, the wily courage with which they have greeted the stacked deck that history has dealt them, undercuts any pride or smugness I might have, because they are better people.
I had a choice of careers, and they have none of that. I knew if I quit a job on Friday I could certainly have, if I wanted it, another job on Monday week – I did this twice – and to them this is inconceivable. I knew I could strive in my life to do the kind of work that suited me, and I had a fair chance of getting that kind of work, and to them that is a preposterous fantasy. I knew I would certainly make enough money to buy a house and raise a family and put them through university, and they dare not even think of that.
And yet they look forward, with a kind of joshing hope, to the one life they will have on this earth, in an era not of their choosing. They look forward to, at best, an uncertain series of part-time jobs in different parts of the world and an abiding hobby – in music, surfing, writing, ecological protest, iridology, fly-fishing, late night conversation, romantic love – that will give their existence meaning for a decade or two, and then who knows? Perhaps they will own a few acres then, and will be growing and sharing radishes when the Great Bust comes. Perhaps they will be busking. Perhaps, at last, the song they wrote this year will be a hit, or the computer game they are still perfecting, or the better beer they are hoping to brew by then. Or perhaps they will be starving, or dead of chemical misadventure, but…them’s the breaks.
If courage is grace under pressure, they have it. They have done their hundred and ten job interviews, and have been turned down. They have dressed up, and pretended, and come away rejected, and had a drink and got up the next morning. They have auditioned for NIDA, and narrowly missed. They have mixed martinis in a boutique bar that soon went broke. They have fossicked for gold beyond Kalgoorlie and found none.
And now we are lecturing them on Mutual Obligation: they must be thrilled with that. For they have put in the hard yards, in thirteen years of imprisonment in schools in crowded classrooms with overworked teachers, in obsolescent courses that led nowhere. They believed us when we told them this misery meant, at the end of it, fulfilment in life. A job. A career. A family. Continuity. Hope of personal triumph. And now they have done the hundred and ten job interviews, and found we were lying. At least one half of that Mutual Obligation is ours, and we have not delivered. And they do not trust us anymore, or believe anything that we are saying. And why should they? We have told them lies.
I love these young people and their courage and their grace, but I know now having watched them that we are losing more and more of them year by year – to drink, to heroin, to a kind of rootless euphoria that keeps them hitch-hiking with a surfboard, a guitar, a smoking habit, a dream of the Good Place they will not find. To the sullenness that follows thwarted love. To the crazier political movements. To sudden bursts of petty crime and AIDS in gaol. To suicide in the spare room of a friend.
And part of our Mutual Obligation is to understand that this is not their fault. Illiteracy is at least in part the fault of the bad schools we have given them, or of moving from school to school as their parents lose their jobs and move on. Lack of career ambition is at least in part the fault of us not giving them any real hope of career, as I once knew it, or of choice of work, as I once knew it. The accusing finger points, and it points at us.
Or it points at those economic fashions that are ripping all hope from the modern world – and restoring slavery under the usual euphemisms of work for the dole, or privatised prisons, or illegal immigrant labour, or unpaid overtime, or the free-market cargo cult that asks us to freely compete with slaves by becoming slaves ourselves, and to cop the sack from more and more places of work as the only hope for full employment at some time as yet unknown in the pig-flying future.
I love these young people – or I love the friends of my children that I know – and one by one I see that I am losing them. They might have done well in the end, had they survived. They might have had children themselves, that they would have loved. And they probably will not. I mourn them already. And I hate the society that is inch by inch eroding their self-esteem and wasting their talents and their stoicism and grace and is now persecuting them for merely being born with hypocritical word games – mutual obligation, tough love, compassion with a hard edge, downsizing, workplace efficiency – worthy of Georgian England, where nine-year-old children were hanged for stealing purses to feed their parents and siblings, and prayers uttered up from the gallows for their souls.
It is time the lying stopped, and the hypocrisy and the tyranny. It is time, and time already, for a Sorry Day for our young. They are better people than we will ever be, and we are wrecking most of them, and slowly killing some of them, day by day.
Name:
Eventually, the job interview (after the decision of the powerful recruitment staff); the jumping-through- hoops; finally, success for the fortunate ones. Our parents tell of sitting across from the boss, straight up. No maze to make your way through.
Then, down the track, for one friend, a “cardboard box” escort out of the building. No “are you OK” calls. That’s what’s wicked.
Some insist on calling our parents’ days, the bad days.
I am just two years older than your son, Bob. I hope that thirteen years later your fears and anxieties for your kids and their friends have been relieved. When I read this I felt quite sad, because the pain of your fears as a parent about the future for your kids and their friends very much came through. I wonder if my own parents ever felt that. Please forgive the length of this comment, but I don’t know how else to present my thoughts on this one.
In the coastal town (or city now, technically) I told you of in my response to your Breaking Bad post, there were many young lives lost to car accidents and suicides. My partner’s best friend took his life by driving into an oncoming car on the highway not far from my partner’s parents’ home. He’d been experiencing a psychotic episode and actively sought help, but did not get the help he needed. Within half an hour after being discharged from a mental health unit where he had tried to admit himself, he was dead. There were also many horizons cut short – some from too much pot, others because of teachers and parents not having any expectations of young people. That coastal city has one of the highest youth unemployment rates in the State (a State with no right to have ANY youth unemployment). The local high school, which my partner and I both attended, never had a fabulous reputation but it’s reputation has very much declined since either of us were there.
I think perhaps, Bob, that some of the fears you identify for our generation perhaps were not realised in the end, especially in terms of career pathways and options. If I was able to speak to my younger self as a teenager and then uni student I would tell myself not to worry so much. I would CERTAINLY tell myself not to worry so much about Year 12 Exams and THAT score. We let kids believe their whole lives ride on that two years and that all important number, but once you are out there in the world you realise it’s a crock. There are so many pathways to get where you want to go. Take time to figure out where that is.
My partner and I both spent our teenage years in that town. Now, we are both in a very good place but our pathways were very different during the 90′s. I was academic, and my teachers had expectations of me. He was not, and his teachers thought he was a trouble-maker. My parents supported my learning. His did not – and if anything his father actually sabotaged him. I knew I wanted to go to uni, and I knew what I was interested in. He didn’t know what he wanted to do. He didn’t pass Year 12, because he hated the school – just like his teachers expected of him (some teachers really do have a lot to answer for). But he went on and did it a year or so later as a mature ager at a college. He kind of roamed his way through the next several years, bits and pieces of jobs. Jack of all trades. Master of none. Often juggling two or three jobs. One or two to pay the bills, and another one to fund the partying at the pub. Eventually, he found his pathway and got it together. He built his own expectations of himself.
I think that the sentiments of your article would ring true for him for that time. I certainly think there’s a touch of Gen X chip on his shoulder at times – especially now as a supervisor managing many Gen Y staff. But I also know that he’s proud that he did things the way he did them. I don’t know that he’d have it any different in the end. Now he knows that it all gets better. But now, as an adult with everything looking ok, whether he would look back and remember that. I shall have to ask him.
By the way, Bob – can we ask what prompted you to share these Classic Ellis pieces on childhood today?
I am turning seventy soon, and was thinking on these things.
Thank you Bob, and thank you My Girl Pearl. I was deeply touched by both excellent posts.
There is such pressure on education of late, to ensure that when our youth come out of the system they are readily employable, as cogs in the works.
It was starting to be so when I finished university, though I don’t suppose someone who chose law as early as year 9 or 10 can be heard to complain!
It would be good if education was just that, a process of “leading out” or of “bringing up”(educatus) rather than of vocational training.
I am extremely concerned about their future and can’t see dumping a many thousands of dollars into a college education for them to come out into a world where there are no good paying job.
I just rather keep them at home, and figure out another skill or trade since clearly college will not be paying off in the long run.
The future is not going to be based on what you know more like who you know………crazy world these days and it is frightening the heck out of me.
Hospitals are closing and merging left and right, loosing money due to the government cutbacks on reinbursements, firing everyone they can to meet their bottom line and no one is safe. You can’t even become a nurse without feeling threatened about cutbacks.
Sorry if I have offended anyone here however today I went to get ice cream with my kids (as one example) and a two year old demanded to pet my dog. Her mom and dad were right next to her albeit Dad looked like a well groomed, tall, handsome, meth-head.
I told the little girl very nicely not to pet my dog since she was part chiwawa and can be moody and bit. She ignored me and kept walking to my dog. I told her again no. Finally after the fourth plea for her not to pet my dog, her mom finally wolk up, grab the brat and stopped her.
Where were her parents you may be asking yourself? Right next to the little girl. Did they care less that the child was about to get her face bitten off. Nope not at all.
I told the mom that I was sorry her daughter could not pet our dog where in turn her Dad (meth-head) chimed in to say: “that is why she kept asking if she could pet your dog” & he was angry she could not pet my dog…….ugh what the heck. Get her a dog then!
Dad clearly did not understand or notice that although the little girl asked if she could pet my dog she kept walking to my dog even though I kept saying NO; until she was right on top of the dog.
Dad I believe thought his daughter did the right thing by asking if she could pet the dog, yet kept walking to the dog which he didnt acknowledge.
I want to tell stupid Dad that yes his daughter asked to pet the dog but still kept walking towards the dog and you did nothing at all to stop her even though you were right next to her……old Meth Head would not have given a darn I believe.
I see this generation as twisted and twisting words and creating new meaning for things where there should be none. In a word trying to get out of hard work, responcibility, committment, regard for humans, and RESPECT for anyone but themselves. It is all for one and one for all…ME-Gen.
I have never seen people like this generation and hopefully with this economy things will change. I don’t like what I am seeing at all and more than likely I am alone in this but who cares anymore.
I think the world has gone crazy and everyone was to busy working to guide this generation; we are now seeing what we have raised and it is ugly.
Call me conservative and that is fine but guitar playing and smoking pot & doing meth is an excuse to get out of reality and it does eventually catch up with everyone………….feel free to bash. I don’t care.
Why would anyone want to ‘bash’ as you put it? You are entitled to your views, and your observations are consistent with that.
But you might consider that it is a small sample; my own experience suggests to me that little has changed in this latest generation. I am middle 50s by the way.
History shows us that people react in very similar ways and that human nature is no different now than it was in 500 BCE – the plays of Sophocles, Aristophanes and Aeschylus are still relevant today, and we can recognise ourselves in them.
Mimi, how do you know the “sutpid” dad is smoking pot and doing meth…is your nasty Chiwawa a sniffer dog?
stupid
Doug for the most part you are right however if you were to plot on a graph, this generations drive and motivation, and compare it to my Grandfathers, fathers & mine, you would see an outragous difference. Add to this graph morals, & a healthy respect for elders and you would see very sad results unlike any other generation in HISTORY.
My grandfather worked his ass off in a refrigerator factory making $1.25 in a room that reached temperatures of 100+ degrees. He managed to save an amazing amount of money for his family. My Dad was educated and worked too.
I learned more from my diverse family that no college could ever teach. It’s called a healthy dosage of common sense.
But also learned that a nonstop drive & focus works well. While many of my friends took the drug route or the lazy route, I worked my ass off.
Paid off nicely but not so for our children I fear. Seems jobs are disappearing either planned this way or not it is clear that 50 million jobs have disappeared in the last 2 years.
We are all in trouble. And for the gal who asked how I knew the Dad was a meth-head. Um…my eyes are always open and checking people out on who to stay far away from….there are no shortage of people I don’t care to be around these days.
So yes this is the first generation that sees nothing, feels nothing, does nothing, pretends to do something when they are not, should I continue? Frightening…my chilren even notice it at school. All the kids are a mess.
Spirit got lost now something is missing
All the people round here are too bony for kissing
Spirit got lost now I’m about to get lost too
Mental as Anything
Never, ever pat a passing Maltese. Don’t do it.