06-11-2016, 10:24 PM
(06-11-2016, 05:00 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: Hmm…
I had a lousy young childhood. I was a nerd before nerds started projecting their own version of cool. I got my act more or less together my junior year in high school, and pretty much enjoyed social life from there on out, finding various like minded groups to have fun with without too much difficulty.
Many of us were misfits. Some of us did badly at what was 'popular' at the time, like athleticism, and chose other directions. Some of us grew up in god-awful places and knew it. Where I live it is best to think like a peasant -- be sentimental and materialistic, yet undemanding.
Quote:I did a co-op plan through college, going to school for 3 months then alternating with 3 months of work. The co-op jobs paid well in those days. My senior year in college I looked at my tuition bills, looked at my bank account, then went out and bought a brand new car and an organ. These days, instead of a well paying high tech job, a kid would be trying to get an internship, doing unpaid work for the sort of experience I got paid for? Not right. The millenials in the family came out of school with quite a debt burden, while the boomer generation came out fairly clean.
And who can do the internships? The young adults who do not have debts to pay off and can live with their parents until 27 or so. No internship means that if one gets a job it will be something paying at or near the minimum wage with no real escape. We may not becoming as severe a class society as the slave-era South or even Imperial Russia -- but we are headed there. If one is heavily in debt one must take whatever jobs are available, and if one job doesn't meet debt service and raw sustenance, then one needs a second.
Quote:I came out of college into stagflation and the national malaise era. The ride wasn’t always smooth, but I managed to stay with one high tech military industrial complex job for my entire career. For a while wage- price controls made it fashionable for professionals to jump from company to company. Companies weren’t allowed to give competitive wages to keep professionals, so those who wanted top dollar would change jobs every several years. In the Route 128 high tech environment at least, the professionals had the advantage in job seeking. I eventually retired reasonably comfortably, though at the time it felt more like being the victim of downsizing rather than retirement.
That could be the difference between being early-wave Boom and late-wave Boom -- the level of opportunity.
Quote: While my GI father could count on a job for life from Ma Bell after getting a job shortly after World War II, by the end of my career well paid older professionals were often and systematically let go if they could find youngsters who could do the job almost as well for much less money. I guess you could say I wasn’t totally immune to Reagan’s unravelling era reinvention of the economy to favor the corporations over the workers.
Unless one was already in the elite, the Reagan economy was a raw deal. I have yet to see what good came from it. Technology? That had more to do with engineering than with politics. Cheap fast food? A consequence of an abundant supply of cheap, competent labor that could be overworked and underpaid with impunity.
Quote:Music wise, the Beatles were popping out new albums on a regular basis in my youth, while Carol King’s Tapestry was the sound track of my senior year in high school. I know we boomers should not be so very smug about our generation’s music, but no buyer’s remorse there.
Late-wave Boomers got disco... and many of us turned away from the commercial pap made available to us all.
Quote:In my youth, NASA was running projects Mercury, Gemini and Apollo. In young adulthood, Mohammad Ali and Secretariat were doing their thing. For a while on any given night on the half hour network TV news coverage, there was 25 minutes of Watergate coverage. They finally did get the (expletive deleted.) I got a favorable number when they did my birth year’s draft lottery. Over my life time, the local pro sports teams have featured Bill Russell, Bobby Orr, Larry Bird and Tom Brady, all with fine supporting casts. The Red Sox even managed to break their 86 year drought. Not bad.
All in all, I’d say I landed in a pretty good time and place.
The sports stars are as good as ever. So what?
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.