I grew up believing in the American Dream: work hard, do well enough to make it into college, get an education, a degree was an instant ticket to a good middle class job that would be yours for life and would allow you to settle into a comfortable retirement. I followed the rules, went to college, graduated with a liberal arts degree, and then the bottom fell out of the economy just in time for me to graduate from college, making job hunting next to impossible. It took a few years, but I did land a career from which I have just retired, not by choice, but by circumstance, sadly. When the economy tanked a few years ago, my place of employment was forced into austerity measures of downsizing staff, materials budgets and more. The recovery from the Crash of '08 just hasn't materialized, so sadly, more cuts are coming for 2014. Thank goodness I had 30 years in that, as a public employee, allowed me to make my exit with a full pension. It won't be much, but if I am super careful, I should be able to survive. Still, I have not been able to save a dime toward retirement. I've made so little money that I have always had to use every cent to pay bills and survive. I just finished paying off my first new car ever this spring after a 6 year loan note. Then I had to move into more expensive quarters when my old home was demolished for economic development. Now I've been forced into an unplanned for retirement by budgetary concerns at work. I mean, I'm glad to have my life back and all, but looking back at the duration of my working years, it seems that legislators have done everything in their power to crush the life out of our generation's working years. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, they shut down the factories, idling millions of workers, crushed the unions, deregulated everything, including the banks, and have put our country on a path to ruin. My parents generation, the so-called "Greatest Generation", built the strongest and most prosperous middle class ever known to this country. My generation has been screwed by an ethic that I hardly recognize, and as a result, our generation isn't going to live the promise that we'd have it better than our folks. I'm very bitter about all of this because some of us played by the rules and still got screwed. I've never lived beyond my means, have always tried at all times to have a financial safety net underneath me for unplanned expenses, but I've watched my generation's ability to get ahead be badly stunted by bad legislative decisions and downright crappy economic policy. I'm fortunate in that, if I am extremely careful and judicious, I won't have to go back to work anytime soon. I should be able to live a modest and comfortable retirement. I have always been frugal and don't aspire to accumulate stuff I do not want or need.
An iconic song that speaks to the woes of my generation is "Allentown" by Billy Joel. I remember when MTV first came out and I saw the video of this song on it. It spoke volumes to me about what I was witnessing across the country and in my own backyard. You see, I live in an old industrial quadrangle surrounded by Akron, Cleveland, Canton and Youngstown. Steel and rubber was once king here. Steel and rubber mills filled these old cities and yes, they stunk of the smell of manufacturing them, but someone I once met said, in particular, of the dreadful odor of rubber in Akron, "That was the smell of money!" And it's true. Times were, you could graduate from High School and go down to the local rubber or steel mill the next day and get a job that would be yours for life and it would make you a good living that would allow you to buy a home and a car and raise a family. Those days are now gone forever. The landscape is filled with the rusting skeletons of those old mills, industrial scrap heaps of what once meant a good living. It's rather eerie driving by those old places and wondering what it must be like to be someone who made a good living there and seeing it now, an old rusting hulk of what once was. It makes me feel so sad to hear of the plight of great American cities like Detroit and Youngstown, cities once dominated by a single industry. Akron has at least cleverly reinvented itself and has recovered from the loss of rubber as its main source of jobs and money, but there are still plenty of people who never were able to find jobs once those old plants closed and idled so many people. Yes, times are changing, and the United States is in the process of a huge paradigm change from that of an industrial economy to one of being a high tech information based economy, and if you do not have the skills or education to be able to work in fields demanding the skills needed to make it, you're out of luck. But the cost of a college or university education that would allow you to work in a high tech industry has been priced out of the reach of millions of Americans, and funding for education has been slashed very heavily, so is it any wonder that my generation has found itself with a bad case of malaise and dissatisfaction that our working years were so badly marred by decades of deregulation, destruction of unions, closing of factories and high unemployment, not to mention spending our entire working years being stuck with stagnant wages that never allowed us to get ahead the way we aspired to or to save for retirement? In a very big way, I feel gypped out of a chance to have done better. I've never made a lot of money, but for most of my working life, I've had no raises, or raises that were so miniscule as to hardly count, and in recent years, we've seen our health insurance steadily eroded to where it became almost useless. I mean, I'm glad that I am one of the few people I know who was able to stay in the same job my entire career, but I just wish that economic policies of the past 30 years hadn't made it so hard on my generation to be able to live more comfortably and do better financially. I don't think that the generations right behind me, Gens X, Y and the Millennials, will do any better, either. I think that the only generation to have ever gotten a break and done better than the one before is the Greatest Generation, that of my parents. Lucky them. They're the only ones to have ever caught a break.
Once the Republicans began their hatchet jobs on the middle class about the time that I graduated from college, it all went downhill from there. It won't get any better, either. They've got all the money and power and ability to call the shots from now on. They'll take back the Senate and win larger majorities in the House in next year's midterms and will win back the White House in 2016 and we'll continue to see them take the hatchet to the middle class and destroy it once and for all. We'll be living in a completely different world by 2020, a one party right wing country where there are the super rich control everything and the rest of us will be mere serfs. We're almost there now. They buy elections with their money and control which candidates win or lose. The rest of us have no real say in things anymore. They have all of the chess pieces and move them around the board as they see fit. We're mere pawns in a much larger game and we do not count for anything as far as they are concerned. They think nothing of defunding vital social programs so that the rich can get richer and the rest of us can suffer and there's nothing whatsoever that can be done about it. No amount of protesting is going to change a damn thing. The die is cast. We've let them have their way and we can't take things back. We've passed the tipping point and we're headed for a society of aristocrats and serfs. The only things that have ever changed that are wars and revolutions and that is the last thing on earth that I would want to happen. But if history has any lessons to teach us, it's that when the people are starving and the rich are getting fat off of the labor of the oppressed, dissatisfaction ultimately leads to some kind of unrest, usually resulting in violence in some form or another. Well, I have no idea what the future holds, but from where I sit......it doesn't look terribly hopeful. I hope that I am wrong, though.
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