01-19-2020, 12:06 PM
Sorry, but in no way does this Boomer see the Millennial Generation having been coddled. It is expected to go to work as teenagers to establish credibility for college and future employment, and to do much work, often at horrible jobs, just to keep from going into debt peonage after graduating from college. Young Millennial adults face the highest real costs of college education and of property rents ever. If one lacks the stuff (whether intelligence, family connections, or family assets) to attend college, then one has little hope of getting a solid living in semi-skilled work as a factory worker or a vehicle driver. Things might be OK for skilled workers, but such is not a growing activity and entry depends heavily upon family connections to start as an apprentice. Once in the full-time workforce they find that even with the sheepskin that they face low, rigid glass ceilings for the benefit of people born to advantage and exempt from economic competition.
The only thing better that I see for Millennial adults is that the electronic gadgets are much less expensive than the ones that Boomers knew. A stereo set-up in a college dorm room typically cost about as much as a serviceable used car... but the Millennial youth in college needs a car and must pay costs of insurance, fuel, and parking just to hold the menial job necessary for keeping college loans from mushrooming.
I associate Millennial youth with hardscrabble childhood much as I associate GI youth. GI youth got the chance to show themselves meriting far better than that.
The only thing better that I see for Millennial adults is that the electronic gadgets are much less expensive than the ones that Boomers knew. A stereo set-up in a college dorm room typically cost about as much as a serviceable used car... but the Millennial youth in college needs a car and must pay costs of insurance, fuel, and parking just to hold the menial job necessary for keeping college loans from mushrooming.
I associate Millennial youth with hardscrabble childhood much as I associate GI youth. GI youth got the chance to show themselves meriting far better than that.
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.