I hope this will be a letter of understanding. I hope you will see what many of us do, that we understand what lies beneath the anger and confusion at our contemporary condition. I hope you will listen to how some of us see we have arrived at this point.
My parent's were born at the beginning of the baby boom. They are in the first wave of "boomers" to begin to enter their retirement and to draw their social security and to move onto Medicare. They are conservatives and find themselves in this contemporary society frustrated with their need to accept the social safety nets while simultaneously believing it is these safety nets that are contributing to a collapse of their vision of the United States of America. To better understand my parent's point of view, I considered where they came from and where they are coming from now.
In the 60's when my parents completed high school, they were trained and prepared to enter the workforce without a need for a college education. The middle class was growing, tax rates on highest wage earners were pretty high but the state of technology permitted someone with a decent high school education to enter the workforce at an entry level position and make a decent wage. My father went into a unionized trade and got on-the-job training as a welder. His employer offered certifications through his work as he progressed in his skill and craft. My mother worked as a secretary and was offered on-the-job training when new versions of technology were introduced. Both could expect to remain at their jobs for 20 or more years, paying into a pension and being offered opportunities to advance in the companies as they acquired greater understanding of the business and the skills required to succeed. They knew they could do this because they saw their parents do much the same thing. I still remember my maternal grandfather's gold watch he was given upon his retirement for many decades of excellent service to one company, engraved with his name and a thank you from the company for that service. This was, for my family, an honorable time where in exchange for service, you received fair compensation, were able to save for your retirement and you actually knew the head of the company for which you worked.
In the 1970's my parents had children. From the beginning of our lives, we were told the importance of education and cousins and other younger members of our community, entering the workforce, were still able to begin at an entry level position and plan to have a life similar to what our parents had. We were middle-class, we were lucky.
in the 1980's I began my education in public schools and our middle-class life afforded us the opportunity to attend a school with a small student body and large funds for the classrooms. In 3rd grade, I took Spanish class and in 4th grade, I took my 1st computer class, learning to program in basic. Later that year, I took an introduction to electronics course. My education was already proving to be markedly different from the education my parents had. Computers were not common in homes, let alone classrooms but the presence of the Apple IIe computers in my 4th grade classroom were a harbinger of the advances of technology that would change education. By the time I was finishing high school, it was my parents wish that my brothers and I would go to college. Living and working alongside the growth of technology and through the 80's where technological competitiveness was leading to a rise in quality and importation of products, especially from Japan, as well as the outsourcing of certain types of manufacturing jobs to other countries due to the other country's stronger technological capabilities, my parents saw that the standard public high school education may not provide entry into a new workforce. Our community experienced an influx of workers who were leaving the rust belt cities as auto-manufacturing jobs were leaving the U.S. and more wealth poured into our community as the Big Three auto manufacturer middle managers took positions at the stronghold Dow Chemical and Eli Lilly companies in our city. The influx of wealth and the children coming from families of people who had achieved so much with a college education reinforced what they had been telling us. We, their children's generation, would need more education. So, my generation went on to college in numbers that far exceeded all previous generations.
In the 80's as my generation was completing college and beginning to compete in the workforce with my parent's generation, we saw the beginnings of the crumbling of their American dream. Their greatest desire was for their children to have a better life and to be able to find sure footing in a job market made them push us to go to college. To go further in our study than they did, to have a better start. Simultaneously, my parents were finding they were suddenly competing with "kids" just slightly older than I was at their jobs. People coming into the workforce with MBA's and Bachelor's degrees that placed them in the management positions near or even above the perches where my parents had worked diligently to arrive over years of devoted service. Their dream for their children came to compete with their own ability to pursue their, "from humble beginnings" American Dream. If they knew it, or if it confused them, I don't recall that they said. They continued to urge us to go to college, perhaps seeing that it worked! Younger people were starting with salaries commensurate with their own just because they had college degrees. They simultaneously expressed their frustration that they had to accept orders or work along side people who had no "life experience" only a degree. If they didn't hear the dischord of those two positions, I certainly did. I both felt responsible for participating in what created nearly impossible competition for my parents but also strongly that I would not be able to compete in the job market without a degree. Difficult waters for all to navigate.
In the 90's Outsourcing continued. Access to more technologically advanced tools for the workplace evened out in various country's markets, however the wages became a much larger issue for companies. In many ways, the wages my parents had worked so hard to achieve through years of devoted service were compared by the bottom lines of companies struggling to make profits in a global economy where the cost of living in another country was much lower and even a lower wage paid abroad would be a welcome economic boost for those local populations. With the increase of production abroad, the growth of local economies abroad and the subsequent investments in manufacturing in these growing economies, it became necessary to really revamp our trade agreement policies. The large American Middle class needed to be able to buy goods for less since, after all, their wages weren't going up and my parents generation found themselves struggling to compete with better educated people in the workforce increasingly comprised of management for multi-national corporations manufacturing oversees.
Also in the 90's I lived through the major shifts in technology that would forever change our understanding and relationships to other people. When I began college in 1993, I had to telnet into a server, through a dial-up connection to access my email. I wasn't able to communicate with people on other campuses, but I could communicate with people in my network that I need never meet. We talked in "chat rooms" and I was required to check my email for information about my classes. by the time I left University in 1995, I was able to connect with people across the country who were attending other universities. The expectation that I would be familiar with and participate in this technology in order to register for classes or to communicate with professors was made explicit. This was the new means of communication and we were moving to the efficiency of this model. My generation became excellent typists quickly, produced their research papers on word processors and learned the 15 digit code to name the printer in the computer lab to print out our complete research. It was an additional learning curve that I know my parents were experiencing in their own jobs. Having the benefit of a computer in the classroom from age 10, I was not poorly equipped to do this. However, my father still does not own a computer and never learned to type.
The rapid advance of and, (this is my theory) the push by universities to connect through the internet, led to a massive expansion of the capabilities of the Web. By the time I went to school for my Bachelor's of Art in the late 90's, there were multiple web browsers available and nearly all correspondence at the university was online. The industry that was growing most rapidly, pushed by academia and the private corporations for the greater agility of communication across the globe that the internet offered, was in the computer sciences. Computer based technologies, software, data storage, cables and peripheral devices. The true competition in the US hovered around the rapid move toward greatest efficiency and portability of these devices. The manufacturing of these devices moved rapidly away from components easily held in a human hand to pieces so small they must be placed by precision robots left human participation in the physical manufacturing of devices nearly obsolete. The boost, of course, was that many items still required manufacturing that happened on a more "human" scale and so the ability to make food, tools, auto-parts, heavy equipment and the like were still available to people without advanced education. So, while the need for more people in manufacturing dwindled, there was still a steady base of manufacturing that didn't hold the promise to shrink in the way the most rapidly growing industries had been.
At the end of the 90's, we begin to feel the bubble burst. The rapidity of the growth of the computer science related industries left companies and countries with questions about who owned what? What is licensing? How do you assess interstate commerce fees? What constitutes a transaction? How do you price these goods and services? Investment was high but understanding of the future of this growth was low. The dot-com bubble burst and with it, so did much of the value of these companies that had been pushing GDP up and up.
So, back to my parents. They had their pensions, from decades of devoted service, some stock investments, they owned homes and had stable, if not increasing, incomes. They were approaching retirement and had seen everything they believed about the American Dream that included the ability to move from humble beginnings toward reward for service shift and mutate throughout their working lives. The urged their children to do the things they saw brought success to others in their communities even though our successes, in many ways, led to their stagnation. I begin to see where frustration might set in.
I will not go into the wars, though perhaps the feelings of an older generation about the role of U.S. war-waging around the globe may be the most divisive topic of all, but I will talk about the things that accompanied those wars. Major recessions. With the economic downturns we have experienced thus far in the 00's, my parents have been all but wiped out. Their wages, which hadn't appreciated much relative to cost of living increases, since the 90's due to their lack of advanced educations and the extraoridinary competitiveness of the highly educated workforce produced from my generation, had been enough for them to maintain. Refinancing their homes allowed them to make further investments in themselves and to improve their lives for a while, though they took on additional debt terms doing it. They participated in the lead-up to the housing market bubble burst by capitalizing on equity that the markets supported prior to the burst. They are now undewater for that amount and more after the "pop" and subsequent economic downturn. They are both at or beyond what had been "retirement age" though neither of them can afford to retire. Both have been forced, due to health concerns, to enroll in medicare and to begin drawing Social Security in order to keep their homes and make ends meet. Neither of them can see a time in their future where the Social Security will be enough to live off of and so do not plan to retire until their bodies force retirement upon them.
My parents inability and refusal to retire is a harbinger of a different kind. A new generation of ultra-educated and ever more specialized people is prepared to enter a workforce in the U.S. that is primarily driven by the computer sciences, advertising, health-care and public service. The message their parents (people my age, if I had children) would have given them was, you have to get an advanced degree. Everyone has a bachelor's degree, you need to be better trained and have a specialization these days. College costs have risen, contributing to major setbacks in retirement planning for many in my generation, causing families to stretch to the limit to educate their children or to take on copious amounts of debt. All of this in the promise of the New American Dream. The idea that with this education, you will be able to enter the workforce and begin building upon your expertise immediately. There will be a minimum of on-the-job training and this will be a benefit to employers! You'll arrive with the knowledge needed and they can put you to work for them right away. But, as I said, my parents were on the front edge of the Baby Boom generation. They are just now in bodily need of retirement but unable, unless forced, to leave the workforce. Their grandchildren are trying to do what they were told was the right thing to do. To make themselves the most attractive candidate, filled with knowledge and a hunger to go to work after so many years taking on debt or stretching every dollar for their education. However, there just aren't enough jobs.
The Baby Boom generation will continue to move into retirement age for another 10ish years. Many, like my parents, will have had setbacks through the various economic downturns that prevent them from willingly leaving the workforce. Young people who have just completed their education and have the debt equivalent to a small home mortgage before the age of 25 are unable to move into the workforce until these jobs are vacated or new jobs are created. Everyone is stuck.
I understand the bitterness that may come from seeing everything about what you believed was the "right way to live" the honorable way to work and raise a family shift and change throughout your life only to have nearly everything you had worked for stolen away in the market crash of 2008. You did what you believed was right. You did your part, you were diligent and loyal. In exchange for that loyalty, you end your life in struggle instead of enjoying the fruits of honest labor.
However, I also understand my own generation and the generation now preparing to move into the workforce did what they were told and they believed was right. They invested in themselves, they were too young, unemployed or unprepared, to invest in the markets and yet, they're seeing their own lives wiped out by debt before they ever had the chance to grow fruit from their labors. I can understand the apathy that accompanies looking forward into a life that shows little promise and the internal struggle for understanding if it was right or wrong to believe in yourself, to make that investment, to take that chance.
In all, we, as a society have arrived at this point together. With the best of intentions by some and with bad intentions by some. By and large, we have moved toward what we believed was right, toward investment in our own skills and abilities and a desire to use those skills to benefit our society. If we are unable to find empathy for one another on hot-button political topics, in our posture regarding war or the role of the U.S. in global politics and military concerns, can we at least recognize in our fellow citizens that for most of us (and I believe nearly ALL of us) we have sought to be good, honorable and to serve our society with the best skills available to us?
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