Ugh, this sort of shit is so predictable.
Parents need to do a far better job in helping young adults understand that the money spent on education needs to be able to be recouped in the form of a real job on the other side. Parents would also do well to explain the importance of hard work, personal responsibility, vision, personal sacrifice and minimizing the sense of entitlement.
Look, people younger than 30 aren’t a different species. Young people want stuff to work. They want good jobs and to get paid well or at least fairly for them, they want some sense of security (in no small part because they’ve watched what has happened to their parents without it) and they want the freedom to figure out their personal lives as they see fit. This shit isn’t complicated. They want what we all wanted, what we maybe all still want. And they’re scared, like we were, that they won’t get it.
Bitterness toward them and their supposedly unrealistic expectations has nothing to do with those expectations and everything to do with people who, having gotten the shit kicked out of them by life, have decided to turn their anger on anyone who hasn’t had all hope of bettter beaten out of them with a hammer. And you know what? This chuckling condescension, this “wait till you get out in the real world, kid,” isn’t actually a plan or any kind of assistance whatsoever. It’s not even advice. It’s just smug therapy for the person saying it.
A.
Just more of the “I’ve got mine, fuck you” mentality and, dare I say…entitlement.
I think a lot of us are in some weird Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome…everything one moment looks ‘normal’ and then the next it is as if the wheels are coming off and we are in the opening sequence of Thunderdome or something. I dunno, I am definitely on an edge, and so close to falling off and in emotional vertigo I grasp for anything to get my balance, and flailing, realize there isn’t anything dependable to grab onto. So I get it (the bitterness) it is a kind of fix maybe.
My sense is that I need to be that strange combination of foolish and demanding to not go there despite the lack of anything much else to hang onto. To simply understand that my own personal survival is trivialized by my focusing on it alone. I have to trust that we are better off the I am.
Linked to web page comes close to a trend that worries me. Namely that education needs to be linked to a job, so drop the required credit hours for music, english, history, etc. The idea of an education rounding out one’s humanity is dead.
At the same time, it fits in the “I’ve got mine” mentality that NTodd states. Yet the ones that have already gotten theirs are the same ones that are dropping support for education (at all levels) and making jobs more mechanical cogs on a machine at minimum wage without job security and without reasonable benefits.
Yes, MapleStreet and NTodd. I also think there’s a huge amount of self-pity disguised as sanctimony…
Then there’s the irony that many of these people turn around and defend the sort of legacy system that gives us “successes” like George W. Bush or the Koch Brothers…
They want worker bees, not citizens. Because citizens are a threat.
Fuck them.
“They want worker bees, not citizens.”
Short, to the point, and so true.
Try selling that “minimizing the sense of entitlement” bullshit to your average, well-heeled senior citizen here in FloriDUH