A article published in the New York Times this week has left me quite perplexed. This article titled, "What Is It About 20-Somethings?", goes into great length to try and discover the reason why the 20-someones are failing to travel the traditional cycle paved by generations before.
"The traditional cycle seems to have gone off course, as young people remain untethered to romantic partners or to permanent homes, going back to school for lack of better options, traveling, avoiding commitments, competing ferociously for unpaid internships or temporary (and often grueling) Teach for America jobs, forestalling the beginning of adult life."
I am no doctor or even a genius, but could this lack of following tradition be just the renaissance this country needs. Where has this holier than though tradition led us? The divorce rate is over 50%, unemployment rates are higher than ever, we are STILL at war, the housing market is failing, the automotive industry is bankrupt, youth education is suffering budget cuts and the government has handed out checks to stimulate the economy while simultaneously extended the time allowance for benefiting from not working. Oh and we're fat.
"Sociologists traditionally define the “transition to adulthood” as marked by five milestones: completing school, leaving home, becoming financially independent, marrying and having a child. In 1960, 77 percent of women and 65 percent of men had, by the time they reached 30, passed all five milestones."
I may be missing something, but the tradition needs to be updated. What is wrong with gaining higher education? Since when did supporting the ones you love become shunned? What is the rush to achieve these profound milestones by the age of 30? What happens then? All the happy couples suffocated by their jobs, without time to raise their children, go on vacation, read a book, learn new things? This is not 1960.
The article prefixed with two examples of syndicated television debuts this fall is more irritating than the authors lack of providing relevancy. If the tradition was working the television industry would not be capitalizing off of this new era of so-called inadequacy in life development. Anyone else pissed they aren't considered an adult because they haven't succumbed to the perennial march from step 1-5.
Dream on 20-Somethings. Continue to decline to settle for the mindless job that keeps you away from finding the relationship that breeds love, time to actually raise your children and opportunity to better the world we all live in. Happy people equals healthy, stable and productive people. Right now we're all fat, lazy, unemployed and on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I don't know about you, but any cycle "they" say I'm suppose to follow needs to be rerouted.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/magazine/22Adulthood-t.html?_r=2&partner=rss&emc=rss
Damn...I got a warning saying that my comment can only be 4,096 characters but after inputting it into Word and doing a character count, its 11,908! Serves me right for being long winded, but here are a few paragraphs of how I feel about the subject:
ReplyDeleteLook at the whole of the 20th century. Not to discount the first decade, but from the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913 to WWI which ran from 1914-1917; alcohol prohibition and organized crime of the 20s; The Depression and subsequent “New Deal” of the 30s; WWII of the 40s (culminating in unnecessary NUCLEAR annihilation,); the Korean “conflict” of the 50s; the Vietnam "conflict" of the 60s and 70s (in the midst of the psychedelic era,); assassinations of JFK, RFK, MLK, Malcolm X and countless Black Panthers and other political opponents; the drug prohibition; the introduction of Iran as a “terrorist state” in 1979; Reaganomics and Iran-Contra of the 80s; the Gulf War and smaller "conflicts" like the one in Panama in the early 90s; Clinton with his Waco and his Oklahoma City bombing, to his NAFTA enslavement of immigrants as labor-commodities to be “freely traded”; the grander WTO of the turn of the millennium and the subsequent rise of China; and then BOOOOOOM, 9/11/01...
The 20-somethings are now charged with making sense of it all, and “sense” has nothing to do with inflated mutual funds on the backs of continual foreign decimation; exclusive educational aspirations that exalt this credential over that; drug prohibitions that do nothing except lock up conscious citizens, turn our cities into murderous “ghettos” and enrich organized criminals with trillions of black budget profits; political extortion by multinational “special interests” where you “play ball” or “get a bullet”; or pharmacologically-driven massacres like Columbine or Virginia Tech, those which we are so quick to mourn but refuse to consider their broader implications in a population literally hijacked by white coats, from the inside out…
The way I see it, 9/11 was the Orwellian “2+2=5” indoctrination into accepting mindless social conformity and endless foreign wars, as well as paranoid domestic surveillance. This is what 20-somethings (like ourselves) inherited post-high school. How do 2 planes hit 2 towers yet 3 towers fall? Hahahahahaha, checkmate globalists, as if we can’t reject such blatant, intentional deception, what the hell are we gonna do about an oil gusher, or a war that spans from the Israeli Mediterranean to Pakistani Indian Ocean?
Look at the national debt and our trade deficit; look at individual debt; look at genetically modified food, consolidated corporate farming and terminator seeds; look at the FDA, CDC, SEC, MMS, or any other “oversight” body that We the People have no interest/ability to hold accountable; look at GPS and satellite surveillance in conjunction with RFID and cell phone trackability; look at nanotech and the ever increasing hysteria for H1N1 type “voluntary” inoculations, then look at veiled fiction like “I Am Legend”; just look at these things and consider their integration. While the Baby Boomers stare down a barrel of no social security, evaporating/looted pensions, and property values that have dropped so much they couldn’t sell it if they tried, we are LITERALLY looking at a situation where “America” may not even exist to prosper in IF “our” generation doesn’t realign its priorities. “America” will merely be a lord-serf country where we “rent” our land BACK from the very bankers who foreclosed us in the first place, those same bankers that created the interest rates that kept us in perpetual debt since we signed on the dotted line at closing.
I continued with a solution, with a legitimate generational-aspiration, but we're not even ready for that so I figured that'd be the section I omit. Keep up the great work Nat!!! (I HAVE been reading regularly, trust. Go Jets :)
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