puffs Don’t trust anyone over thirty sister. exhales
I was thinking the same thing. I turn 32 in December. I was like, “Wow, my generation hasn’t even inherited the levers of power yet and already I am, ‘the man’.”
I place the blame three generations into the future, but then I’m from a generation of iconoclasts.
I’m actually appreciating coming of age in the 80’s now - we’ve done recession before, and last time I did it, I was a green 18 year old with no post-secondary education or job experience (and damned few material possessions or credit available). I think it’s easier to go from having a tough time to having an easier time; you appreciate it more.
Agreed, especially that last part. Yes, previous generations have fucked some shit up here. Royally.
However, we get to fix them. Yes, it’s a pain in the ass and borderline unfair, but it is what it is, and I don’t want to have the same albatross hanging around the necks of my progeny.
I have long believed that one of the quiet goals of our corporate world is to displace as much as possible of that need to compete from the macro-level of large corporations to the micro-level of the everyday individual. They don’t want to have to scratch to stay alive, and as long as they can force us to, they won’t have to.
No. Those are new attorney hires who come in through specific programs (they’ve changed the name, I think Honors Attorney Fellow is in vogue these days). I came in through such a program myself. It may be different in DC, where most of them are placed, but if you’re in the field, you’re doing work from the second day out. Generally your assigned mentor (kind of like a senior partner) will monitor your transactions (or projects varying by what your agency does) until your bar results are announced, but you are still responsible for executing and doing the work. I was doing asset transfers the 2nd day that I was on the job-most of the federal agencies do not have the luxury of keeping new hires on document review-especially my agency, which has the highest rates of retiring employees in the entire federal sector. Actually, the workload & responsibilities for new attorney hires are significantly higher than what we give summer interns-my mentor would have been frothing at the mouth had I pulled something like this as a graduated attorney.
For our summer interns, we generally focus on training them on the agency’s mission by assigning them discrete research tasks and giving them exposure to various regulatory programs and what the legal division does to facilitate the agency’s mission. I had assigned this one the arduous and childlabourish task of writing a summary of the back/forth responses and the legal issues involved 1) so that he/she would have a basis for understanding what goes on during closing, which I was planning on letting him/her attend with me as an assistant 2) to put in as part of the internal office file on the transaction. Most people want to claim that they worked one a project in one of the two program areas I handle (one of which I’m the head lawyer and the other one which I share with my old mentor) because a) it requires interaction with big name private sector actors and 2) there are well-known private law firms that specialise in this field.
I graduated into the late 80s recession. And while I was well positioned to take advantage of the 90s tech boom, the first five years out of school sucked - and I did really well compared to most of my friends.
Social Security probably won’t be there for me, although I think I have an advantage over someone fifteen years older - I was told starting out that I’d need to fund my own retirement - pensions had dried up and SS was going to be bankrupt. I feel for people who entered the workforce believing in pensions and SS solvency only to be told that they had to find their own dollars to retire on. Of course, many of them didn’t - many of them still don’t - but at least my generation didn’t enter the workforce under the illusion that someone else was going to look after us (or if we did, it was self constructed).
I would have never thought in the 1980s that I’d attend commitment ceremonies for gay friends - and watch those unions be recognized (not in my state yet). When I went to school, I rode the bus with armed federal marshalls because the black kids were coming to the white schools. (Louisville, 1975) We seem to have made some progress.
Ecologically speaking, when I was growing up, rivers and lakes caught on fire, humpbacks were unlikely to survive, and Love Canal was in the news. While we aren’t green, we are making progress. Politically speaking, I’m old enough to remember duck and cover exercises in elementary school.
I’m going with (B). I’m 27 and have lived in the USA all my life, and it seems obvious to me that I am a member of the most fortunate group of people to ever live. For the one thing, I and my peers take for granted that we will always have food, water, housing, electricity, heat and air conditioning, sewers (you can’t appreciate flush toilets properly until you’ve tried living without them), cars, paved roads, clothing, schooling, police protection, fire protection, and everything else that makes for a comfortable life. That alone is enough that we ought to spend several hours a day thanking our elders for what we’ve inherited. Most people who ever lived did not have these things. Most people alive today do not have these things. None of these things happen by accident. Millions of people must labor hard every day so that we can eat what we want. Uncountable amounts of money and effort went into our roads, our electric grid, and our sewers. Quality police and fire departments do not appear by accident. Everything that we have comes down to us because of the hard work of our parents and grandparents and the generations that came before.
But in addition to taking the necessities for granted, ours is the first generation to take the luxuries for granted. The most obvious example is entertainment. Many of us carry around thousands of songs, movies, and TV shows on our computers, a large percentage of which was flatly stolen via file-sharing networks. How many of us ever stop to think how unusual this is? Twenty years ago, 20 video tapes was a huge movie collection. Same with college education. The amounts of financial aid we get are huge compared with what our parents got. We live in bigger houses (or ritzier condos). We drive better cars. We eat out more often. We buy new clothes more often. We take longer, more impressive vacations. We have vastly more of everything than any earlier generation ever had, and we’ve done much less work to get it. To say that “everything is screwed up” vastly underestimates the number of things that can be screwed up.
What if we don’t get to fix them? What if the greedhead boomer masters of the universe (assume for a moment that they exist, and that they rule) have pulled the ladder up not only on the next generation but on society itself? What if the game has been fixed so well and thoroughly that nothing short of a second Dark Age will unfix it?
Yes, I’m feeling apocalyptic today. So?
That statement about taking our luxuries for granted makes me feel if anything a little worse yet. History and myth both suggest that at that point, civilization is living on borrowed time. We may need a second depression or a third world war just to keep ourselves in balance.
Then build a new ladder. Our ancestors didn’t even have store bought nails or kiln dried lumber and they managed.
Based on your spelling (not to mention your usage) of the word honourable, I’m going to assume you’re not American. Americans tend to understand what Gore Vidal meant when he wrote, “Power is not a toy we give to good children. It is a weapon. The strong man takes it and uses it.”
Bluntly put, this means that people who use power for anything other than itself, and its own ends, tend to lose it. Those with good intentions make some very tenacious enemies of those without such intentions. In power, such people usually become ineffectual and end up outflanked, unless they learn to stop living by their own principles and merely act in support of those principles. It’s one of the most impossible things humans can do: to become the big faceless THEM and still operate as if one was working for the good.
If that is our nature, then maybe we shouldn’t be able to rise above it.
I’m picking up on a certain sense of ‘entitlement’ that seems to be prevalent in the current ‘generation’. “waa, waa, waaaa! No fair! You should have left the world in better shape for me! Why do I have to suffer for your mistakes?!! No fair…!!”
Get over it, chicky. You can be mad all you want but it is a pointless waste of emotional energy. Don’t be a crybaby. It is what it is - deal with it. That’s what every freakin’ generation has to do when they inherit the earth, not just yours - deal with the world as it is, instead of whining about how it ‘should’ be. And unfortunately, dealing with it will entail making mistakes, sometimes big ones. You are being naive if you think that your own generation will not also make mistakes - well, already have made mistakes, the consequences of which will be passed on to your own children. It’s part of the process.
Every generation suffers as a result of the mistakes of previous generations. And every generation benefits as a result of the advances made by previous generations. It’s easy to look back and say, “well, you should have done this! …and you shouldn’t have done that!” We all love hindsight, don’t we?
If you want to benefit yourself and the world, give up the notion that there has to be some kind of blame assigned for every problem and every ill that besets the world. The ‘blame game’ is the like the ‘thermonuclear war game’ - the only way to win is not to play the game…
NinjaChick, you should only be pissed off at the people who taught you how to be angry at everyone else. Like others have said before, being pissed off is a waste of time. Doing something to better yourself, others, or your environment around you would be a better use of your time. Otherwise, you do become the target that future generations of broad-brush blamers whine about.
Graduated high school in 1981…a recession, with double digit inflation.
Got a job working at Price Club, working full time and going to college on my off days.
Graduated college in 1990…another recession, dismal job prospects.
Started a business in 1992…almost folded in the first month, due to California’s inability to balance a budget. Stayed working at previous job to cover our expenses until I was able to take a paycheck from our current business.
Working at our (wife and me) business for 17 years now, currently serving 160 Developmentally Disabled adults in our community, employing 65 people. I now pay the maximum in Social Security tax, and the full scale of Medicare tax. I helped my oldest son purchase his first house (previous foreclosure), because I would have been stupid to let this opportunity pass HIM by.
Like I said before, being pissed off at previous generations is a complete waste of time.
Blame is one thing you don’t need to assign, there is always plenty to share - with some left over!
As for the contention that people in the 50s could support a family on one income, well, sure.
Except you could do the same thing today if you’re willing to live like people in the 50s did.
Yeah, you need two incomes to afford two or three cars, a dishwasher, cable TV, Netflix, a cell phone plan, an apartment in a big city or a large house in a suburb near a big city, restaurant meals every other day because you’re too tired after working all day to cook, day care for the sprogs, and on and on.
If the wife stayed home you’d need only one car. Get rid of your phone, only a landline for you–oh, you’ve got a personal phone number? Wow, lucky! And a black and white TV that gets 3 channels–well the neighbors have one, but they are hugely expensive, so you get to listen to the Lone Ranger on the radio, and watch TV when you’re visiting. And you live in a five room 800 square foot house with no insulation. You’ve got an electric refrigerator so you don’t have to pay the iceman. You save on daycare because the wife stays home with the kids, you save on food costs because the wife stays home and spends hours turning the cheapest food she can find into edible mush. White bread and margerine, slice of liver, canned green beans and a glass of milk?–hey it’s got all 4 food groups! Isn’t modern nutritional science great?
And this is assuming you’re white.
While I think we have every right to judge the collective decisions past generations have chosen to make, we should do so realistically. People as a whole are always going to be more motivated by what improves their own lives over what is better for the world or society. This is just as true of your generation as it is of your parents’ and grandparents’ generation. This is not to say that it is impossible to get society as a whole to think long-term or altruistically, but it’s always going to be a slow, uphill battle with great resistance from those who aren’t willing to risk losing what they have. Basic human nature is going to make it very hard to keep us from ruining the planet in the long term.
Yea, my parents generations sure had the life, first they had to survive the great depression during which my father lost 2 siblings due to influenza (they didn’t have time to ruin medical care yet). Next all they had to handle was World War 2
Now some of them have the audacity to live long lives just to screw with the inheritance of some of the younger posters here. Heaven forbid you go out and make it on you’re own!:rolleyes:
My parents eked out a living by working hard, forgoing things for themselves to provide for the family.
I am doing the same for mine-
My Mother passed some years ago but my father is 92 and still living on his own and I hope he spends his last hard earned cent the day he dies- they earned it and they should spend it
Man what a bunch of babies some of this new generation is.
(I am 56)
When are those death panels gonna get to work on thinning out all these bitter old pricks and letting the rest of society progress?
You can also save lots of money with 50’s style medical care. Especially for things like cancer. The standard treatment for cancer was to have the doctor look you over and give you advice on how long you had to update your will.