Originally written July 4, 2020
On the day Trump leaves office, we’ll still have a younger generation with worse life prospects than their parents had faced.”
— DAVID BROOKS, New York Times”
David Brooks might be the closest thing we have to a philosopher among modern newspaper columnists.
The talk about one generation not having it as good as the previous one has been around for a while.
In fact, my late father who was born in 1926 and died in 2008, often said his generation had it much easier than ours in several respects. He essentially worked for one employer — the U.S. government — for his whole life.
He never had to worry about health insurance or retirement. Money for both was deducted from his paycheck every two weeks. He didn’t have to be concerned that a layoff would come out of nowhere and blindside him.
Things changed significantly for my generation, the so-called Baby Boomers. I had seven different employers in my career in journalism and was retired early when revenue cuts resulted in layoffs all across the industry. I’m retired well only because my wife had a great job at the top of her field.
My two children are heading into middle age and both are doing incredibly well. But they’re anomalies in their own generation. My son graduated from college 13 years ago and he has friends who still owe large balances on college loans and have yet to find work in their own field.
But the real problem is much bigger. It dates back 40 years and maybe the biggest example of it is Margaret Thatcher in the U.K. She came to power in Britain just a little before Ronald Reagan was elected president, and the two of them hit the West with hardcore conservatism at about the same time.
Thatcher’s most famous quote is probably that Socialism fails when you run out of other people’s money, but there was another that was far more insidious.
“There is no such thing as society.”
And there, in seven words, is the basic problem. Too many people think they are the center of their own private universe. Shelter at home to help eliminate contagion in your community?
“What community?
“I want to go to a bar and see my buddies.”
Brooks points out that Trump is only part of the problem. He might not have tried to inspire us to encourage our better angels, but he sure didn’t force anyone to go to bars or to eschew wearing masks.
In the end, there’s Walt Kelly’s brilliant line that is overused but still true. Kelly wrote it about pollution, but there is far more to it than just that.
“We have met the enemy and he is us.”
We need to start demanding more of ourselves and the people we know. I am very fortunate to know good young people like my daughter Pauline and her college friends Teresa Magula and Ana Reisdorf who are all raising their children to be real people.
It may be difficult to be part of a community in a world where it’s a major struggle just to hang onto a job and pay your bills, but that’s no excuse.
We have to work to make things better.
Otherwise they’ll just get worse.