CSotD: Okay, we lied. It’s your fault for believing us.
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The blurb in the rail includes "made me think" as one of the criteria for being here, and Jeff Stahler's cartoon did make me think.
I've got a rather large bone to pick with him, however, in that, while this is a spectacularly bad time to be in the job market, there is nothing particularly special or new about college graduates not getting work in their fields.
In fact, I once asked my grandfather what his father, a Danish immigrant who worked on the loading dock at an iron mine on the Upper Peninsula, thought of his going to the University of Wisconsin back just before World War I. He said his father thought it was a waste of time, because he had no contacts to help get the boy started after he graduated.
That proved quite wrong, but more because my grandfather got a degree in metallurgical engineering rather than because the nature of college has changed. Had Grandpa pursued art history, he might well have found himself tending bar some place. Or, if he'd done particularly well, teaching art history at a university to America's future bartenders.
But business majors should be able to find relevant job opportunities, so I'll give Stahler the one in the middle and, more to the point, I'll give him the "Lost Generation" title.
When I was a young man, I read "The Sun Also Rises" and found it wonderfully romantic. In those days, I thought Gertrude Stein's comment, "You are a lost generation," meant that Hemingway and his cohorts were directionless, drinking in bistros, going to bullfights, falling in love with people you couldn't possibly fall in love with. And that was true.
But then I read Vera Brittain's shattering memoir of the war, "Testament of Youth," and saw how "lost" could also mean "gone, wasted, dead, wiped from the face of the earth."
I don't think the current crop of college-aged Americans have been as badly served as were Britain's young in that era. Though our continual re-deployment of soldiers is unconscionably cruel and inhumane, those kids are a minority in an age group that, by and large, has enjoyed a privileged existence in the waning days of empire.
Now the party is nearly over and they find, to their chagrin, that everyone else left without paying and the maitre d' is standing over them with a rather large tab in his hand. As someone who would do very well to make 20 more trips around the sun, I can only say, "Sucks to be you."
But I think we should acknowledge, as we grab our hats and run, that we told them some awful whoppers that are making it particularly hard for them to address the current crisis.
Not the thing about going to college to get a good job, which, as said, is an age-old lie.
I'll admit that we've dumbed down college and ramped up its importance, so that you have to go piss away two to four years of your life, and pile up a massive debt burden thereby, in order to qualify for any decent job.
But it's still your fault if you major in Renaissance poetry instead of auto repair.
(Funny-but-depressing insight: A colleague at one of the newspapers I was at specialized in selling to auto dealers and knew them very well. He told me they didn't want to hire the kids who had studied body work at the local voc-tech, because "they've been taught to do it right. They don't want them to do it right. It takes too long. Just hammer out the goddam dents, slap some paint on it and get it out of here!")
(Not-funny-but-still-depressing suggestion: Those articulate captains of industry who periodically make speeches and write articles about the importance of a liberal arts education to foster thinking and problem solving should wander down to their own HR departments sometime and see which resumes are being fed into the shredder upon receipt.)
But as I watch the mostly-young-people on Wall Street, I realize that one of the divides between us is that we raised them on the "Myth of the Tired Seamstress."
You know the story: Once upon a time, there was a Tired Seamstress named Rosa Parks who got on the bus one day and was too tired to go to the back. So she got arrested and everyone had a demonstration and America saw it on TV and said, "Oh, dear! We didn't know that was going on down South!" and so they put an end to it and Martin Luther King made a big speech at the Washington Monument and they all lived happily ever after.
This glosses neatly over the fact that, while Rosa Parks was, indeed, tired that day and did, indeed, work as a seamstress, she was also secretary of the local NAACP. She knew the bus driver, who was a notorious bigot, and she also knew that the movement was looking for a test case.
The idea that Rosa Parks was a simple working woman who somehow wandered into history is a damned lie that minimizes the planning and intelligence of Black America.
We all know the names of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr., but people like James Farmer and Thurgood Marshall had worked for decades before Parks made her stand and before King made any speeches or led any marches, tirelessly, relentlessly using the law to test the limits of equality, and to put White America kicking-and-screaming up against its own belief system.
The amount of groundwork laid before the Freedom Rides, before the Voter Registration Drives, before any of that, is not just a testament to dedication but clear and ample historical evidence that simply standing up and calling for justice is futile.
And yet, just as we've told our kids that, if they go to college, they'll get a job, we've also told them that Jim Crow ended because Rosa Parks defied the law and that the Vietnam War ended because people marched in the street and that mainstream America is just a big friendly dog looking for someone to tell it where to go next and that the country will rally to their sides just as soon as they make enough noise to wake us all up.
It has never been that way. It will never be that way.
We lied to you.
So now what?
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