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Guest Post: A Twenty Something Speaks
Guest Post: A Twenty Something Speaks
By
Steak
(As much as anyone else, I am guilty of complaining that “the younger generation” is absent from the developing collapse dialogue. More than once I have said that if permanent change is to be made, first the young must become involved, then change needs to be embraced by the average Jane and Joe. But when the young raise their voices in anger or protest, such as the On Wall Street contingent, my tendency is to complain about the methods they use or the process they follow. This is patently unfair of me and hypocritical to boot.
With this thought in mind I present the following from Steak, a ZH Veteran by any measure with more time in than me, who many know from the playlists he drops into the comment section from time to time. Please take a few moments and read what he has to say.)
Cognitive Dissonance
12/04/2011
To my peers:
Being born in 1984 offers a special perspective on where society is at present, as well as where it might be going. We are digital natives who also remember the old ways. Our first years of elementary school were characterized by paper encyclopedias, library card filing systems, and Apple II computers. We reached our teenage years just in time for AOL Instant Messenger to become a dominant force in our social lives, and we weren’t just pioneers on Facebook, we were on THE Facebook.
Having a foot planted on each side of distinct historical eras defines us. While the question of generational divides along technological lines is a commonly explored theme, the great divide unique to us is economic.
Those before us only knew and only expect an ever increasing level of prosperity. Those after us only know the turmoil of collapse. The older ones are attached to a world that never truly existed, and the younger ones have trouble imagining any sort of better world. All the while we children of 1983/84 grew up in the last parabolic push of the most prosperous era in human history. It was enough that we can remember in vivid detail how it was, but it did not last so long in our lives that we have some fundamental expectation for it to persist.
At least where I grew up, the idyllic childhood in the bubble years was disrupted by a sign that perhaps things were worse than appeared on the surface. Around the time my cohort was starting middle school, many of us had new kids in our classes. Atlanta being a popular place for refugee resettlement, in the mid 90’s there was a wave of immigrants from the former Soviet republics. We gave them shit as ‘ruskies’ and ‘commies’, but they came along early enough that by high school we were all just part of the same groups.
They were hard, all of them. Where they came from there was hunger, deeply ingrained organized crime, and ethnic hatreds. Their parents were PhDs who had to work for the mafia just to make ends meet. There was a deep appreciation on their part that America was a place, still in those last few years, where if one followed the rules there was a shot at a comfortable life.
It all seemed so dramatic. We were just kids, and those were stories from distant lands. We didn’t know they were describing the violence of collapse. They didn’t know they were only the first victims of a wave that would follow them here and one day sweep the world. Looking back, those things are clear both to us and to them.
Being born 1983/84 put us in a unique position on the day of the inflection point of our time. By September 2001 we were seniors in high school and all around 18. Sure there was talk about how the government would respond, but on that day and in the following months the real question was how WE would respond. Go to college or go to war? In May of 2002 Eminem spoke directly to us when he said:
Fuckin' assassins hijackin' Amtracks crashing,
All this terror America demands action,
Next thing you know you've got Uncle Sam's ass askin'
To join the army or what you'll do for there Navy.
You just a baby,
Gettin' recruited at eighteen,
You're on a plane now,
Eating their food and their baked beans.
I'm 28,
They gonna take you 'fore they take me
Some decided to fight, some were horribly injured, and others died. I can’t commend or condemn how any of my friends decided they would respond to the attack, it was a deeply personal decision for everyone. But that was where we broke with the past. Our parents, as they were conditioned in their lifetime of prosperity, waited for someone to do something……and we realized that someone was us.
For those of us who went to college, we once again found ourselves at an interesting and unique intersection in history. As a member of the class of 2006, we had the incredible luck of entering the work force and gaining critical experience in the last year before the financial collapse. Five years later many of us are moving up to management positions, or at least have substantial resumes. This puts real decision making authority at our fingertips.
There is a responsibility to those older and younger than us, since we are a bridge between eras. It is our responsibility to tell those older than us that the world they have known all their lives is dead, and they fight for it at the expense of future generations. At the same time we must make sure their knowledge does not retire when they do. Our responsibility to those younger is to show them, not tell, but show them that a better future is possible through what we can create.
So far we are handling these responsibilities well. A decade of war has made our peers the most skilled, adaptable, and combat proven fighting force the country has seen since World War Two. 1980's baby Mark Zuckerberg helped found the social media industry, where people in their 20's are making fortunes working at the bleeding edge of technology and social interaction. And most dramatic of all, our peers are at the vanguard of revolutions all over the world from Tahrir to Wall Street.
A source of great strength is that we see the world for what it is, but have also seen what it can be. The way we engage the world is fundamentally driven by an understanding of two great waves sweeping the world. One is collapse, a collapse that began in earnest in 1991 and since then has been deferred and delayed, but not deterred. The second wave is technology. It has the potential to organize us to defend against forces that would tear apart our societies, our families, and our faith in others. Technology has the potential to give all access to pillars of free living including health, energy, and information. And it is on us to fulfill that potential.
By any quantifiable measure of wealth or opportunity, we will be the first generation of Americans to have less than our parents. Yet there is no room for self-pity. There is no room for wishing times were not so hard or that our burdens were someone else's. The coming conflagration and its fallout are ours to engage and overcome. Others wait for leaders to deliberate and decide, but we do not have that luxury. For us there is no hope. There is no fate. All there is are the things we create.
12/04/2011
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No need. They made their bed, now they get to lie in it.
Lol, seems there's a few people here due for a wake up call.
The jobless young will only steal from each other (at best), or text "fuck you" on a phone (at worst).
The employed liberal communist young are working in Washington DC right now as suck ups for cash. No morals.
There are actually no "generations", "boomers" etc.
Only weak people that have been "demoralized", and the strong that *have* the will to fight.
Age does not matter. Your state of ignorance does.
How To Brainwash A Nation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeMZGGQ0ERk
I'll try to tackle as much as I can :D
It is not taking away anything from vets of other wars to say that taken as a whole the current fighting force is as professional and deadly as its ever been. This has a lot to do with the all volunteer military and the country's longest war leading to record-long troop deployments.
Yes, technology in the military is one of the most significant factor in its dominance. Talk to a recruiter and they'll tell you about how standards have been raised considerably in order to have warfighters who can use these new tools.
And talking about technology, the real innovation I'm keying in on is the internet. While it did exist in some form during your time it didn't even really make it to households until the later 90s. It is kind of like nuclear technology, where E=MC2 was around decades before the first civilian nuclear power plants.
Before you go and call me a selfish child, I've got a Greater Depression and a world war to look forward to. I hope you enjoyed 30 years of prosperity, sounds like it was fun.
Steak,
I was born at the very beginning of the GenX era or the tail end of the Boomers, really depends upon the demographer in question. I identify with the GenXers - by and large, the engineering generation that created the Internet - a few of us got enormously wealthy, most got mounds of pretty looking paper when the boomers sold out those same companies or drove them into the ground, and the only ones that really made out with the stock options were the vulture investors (sorry, venture capitalists).
Those of us in tech went through the nuclear winter of 2000-2004, the "mild" recession that left many talented, intelligent and highly trained software/hardware engineers, architects and developers living in family basements or in some cases under overpasses, even while the rest of the country didn't realize that there really was that much of a problem. Many people who entered the field thinking there was a lot of money to be made (mostly boomers) left it fast, most to sell real estate (which was the next big bubble), while the engineers took stock ... and remembered.
Not surprisingly, most of the IT community of my age and through the GenX years have no trust of the Boomers, of the self-absorbed, narcissistic attitudes and disdain for anyone not themselves. Programmers are systems engineers - they have to understand how complex systems work, and also understand that any system, especially any system in which greed, corruption and ignorance can occur, need to be regulated in order to keep these factors from getting out of control. Most of us have been quietly convinced that the train wreck would end up destroying the existing financial system within ten years ten, especially as the dominant operating paradigm in all too many places was a me-first ethos that seemed guranteed to turn into a positive self-reinforcing feedback loop - always scary things to see, regardless of whether it's a stack overflow error or a boiler flux in a nuclear reactor.
My eldest daughter is in your generation, a Millennial. A curious thing has happened with her. Born in 1993, she has learned to knit, sew, and cook, is a remarkably competent artist, and for the most part learned these things online. The school system essentially failed her - her classes were crowded, filled with undisciplined, unmotivated kids, and teachers that were so caught up in their own psychodramas that they could barely deal with the subjects at hand Those kids were unmotivated because the school system itself has been failing, caught up in politics, starved for funding, with teachers who were so underpaid that only the most dedicated or inept would stay, and the dedicated ones eventually burned out. Institutions have failed her and failed her contemporaries, and as your generation comes into power, I suspect the driving factor will be to get them out of the way at all costs.
While I'm not sure I can speak for the GenXers in general, but the IT GenXers will most likely support you. We are engineers. If something is not working right, we will attempt first to fix it, but if that doesn't work, then we will tear it down and try again. That the thing in question here is the financial system is not really that big of an issue to us - sometimes you have to reboot. Of course, seeing the venal idiots who profited off our work when we got the shaft find themselves hated and penniless doesn't hurt either. Just because we are engineers doesnt' mean we don't enjoy an occasional bit of revenge, now and then.
You little f'ing prick.
You said " A decade of war has made our peers the most skilled, adaptable, and combat proven fighting force the country has seen since World War Two."
I do not doubt, given the pathetic pandering you call an education, that you think those words carry the same meaning and message as. "...to say that taken as a whole the current fighting force is as professional and as deadly as its ever been" - which is what your pathetic, ignorant, ill-educated, and self-absorbed @SS thinks.
But as another poster said, words have meanings and the more you use them the more true you make the old adage; "the more you say, the less they think you know".
By the way, your "greater depression" to look forward to comment only serves to further make my point that you are at best a little sef-absorbed, snively metro-sexual Holden Caulfield who doesn't have the balls to be a man but rather wallows in passive aggressive melodrama like a pseudo-neutered feminist.
You don't deserve to wipe the @SS of the men that went before you.
HCSK--Go take a flying fuck at yourself you arrogant ignoramous. You were born in the 60;s; that would make kinda 45 ish? And you lecture about things you don't even have a clue about. ---Got a DD 214 right?
I was born in the mid 30's and I know a few things you don't know shit about. I think, just on a hunch I'd rather take my chances in a foxhole with "Steak" than you. To me you are walkin with a Battleship mouth and a rowboat ass.
This comment comes after I read your proceeding one. B.M.O.C. Milestones
A bit defensive, are we?
The world you live in is DYING. It's values are DYING. You blew it - you got greedy, you assumed that you were entitled to everything, that the pursuit of money for its own end was not only not venal but was in fact moral.
I will never be a millionaire, except perhaps in the brief hyperinflationary supernova that will consume the financial system and wipe out what's left of a debt ridden monstrosity, perhaps about the time that we start and end WW IV, but I know that I have been instrumental in creating what comes next. I helped to build the system that kids like Steak and my own children will end up building the new world from - and I'm being most literal here, as I help to set internet standards for the World Wide Web Consortium. It will be around after the banks have imploded one after the other, because these kids recognize the need for it in their world, far more than they recognize the legitimacy of predatory banks and arrogant investors seeking yield so they can pay for that second beach house.
What these kids know is that they have to educate themselves, because you screwed up the educational system with politics on both ends. They know that they have to act in concert to get anything done, and are capable of organizing with a speed and at a level that is stunning to watch in practice. They know that big government is not the solution, that big business is not the solution, and as a consequence they are learning to be self sufficient in ways that matter - and gaining a world view that allows them to be happy with what they have, something that older generations seem to have forgotten. Steak's cohort, my daughter's cohort, doesn't care a fig for conventions, finds bigoted, misogynist homophobes like you repulsive, and are likely more able to access and process information about anything than you will ever be able to do (put another way, those kids are smarter than you will ever be).
They are not even really self-absorbed - they just communicate over channels outside of what you are aware of. They are the most "connected" generation ever, to the extent that they probably communicate over a wider radius with more people in a day than most people of your generation did over years. They watch very little TV in the traditional sense - most of the pablum that exists on TV today is aimed at the Boomers, because the Millenials are far more likely to be blogging or creating music or discussing (and acting upon) politics or creating apps, more likely to be sewing their own clothes or learning "ancient" trades such as smithing, both because its fun and because in the backs of their minds they understand implicitly that the age of cheap Chinese consumer goods is coming to an end soon, and are adapting in their play to a brave new world.
For me, nearing fifty, the changes to come will be wrenching, but after the tech depression of 2000, not unexpeceted. These kids will grow up with that as the new normal, and like most kids, they will adapt and survive. Which is more than can be said for you.
Dude, take your meds.
What a self-absorbed, angry, bullshit rant - that in the end becomes nothing more than ironic.
It may be fight club, but it's also a community. Where, I'd like to think, people have more in common than in difference.
This conversation between HCSKnight and Steak reads like am argument on whose dick is the biggest.
If one fought to promote a increasingly fascist state your are a brainwashed moron, end of story. When you did it and how well you did it is irrelevant.
Nicely stated, Steak.
See you on the front lines.
Ah more likely a FEMA camp for reeducation, Pol Pot will be leading the first lecture
Speaking as an aging boomer, I'd be ashamed to ramble on about "self-absorbed, ignorant" twenty-somethings.
Far too many boomers are so self-absorbed that they're content to leave giant unpayable debts for guys like Steak, so they can have their comfy retirements and subsidized prescription drugs. And "ignorant"--well, few of us knew in our 20's what we know now. I hear a lot of talk about how rude young people are these days, but what really bothers me is the way older people are often rude and dismissive of the antiquity-challenged.
By the time you're 60 or so (I'm almost there) you've hopefully learned the value of civility in social discourse. Be polite and considerate to Steak; he'll be underwriting your SS check. Remember, Congress already spent everything you paid in to buy the votes of the people who are now over at Shady Rest.
IC, I am glad to see another Boomer who realizes what makes their generation tick, narcissism. Hope exists for some of the older people in this country. As a member of gen-X, we are too small to push any influence or change much between two larger cohorts. The one above has bankrupted us and the one below us never had a chance until they will be forced to make a move. Steak expressed well thoughout dialog for what his generation sees.
Civil discourse? LOL! Civil discourse or civilization hit the road Nov 2008. People voted for it. When things start falling apart soon - I would not be too worried about harsh words.
Steak: first, a greenie on ya.
There's a split/ really more than one split that is hangin' over this discussion (blind men and Elephant touching ...). I'm with you, it ain't technology (both sides have essentially the same), it is about humans (today men and women) committed on (their sides to do) their program. We're about to see bloody claw competition vs. hidden/boardroom (I use Immelt as my avatar, for any number of reasons, but not because he's the worst).
I'm hoping that you are getting more grounded in what you know and why you know it, more capable, then eventually more and more connected to others of similar bent.
You cite the Internet; I'm watching the modern "Winston Smithz" doin' their things (Wikipedia not the least of that).
Work hard; one of the canards about all of this "younger generation sucks" has been the broad brush. That is, financial and political situation results in >47MM (I almost said "American Citizens") folks on food stamps and it is easy to launch the "Idle, Lazy, Stupid ... accusation.
Worth thinking through with a clear eye and mind how this has come to be over my (perhaps your) lifetime.
How can anyone call you selfish? They have no idea, so are also suspect.
Go Play, ...
- Ned
{but don't whine, neither ...}