Esquire's The War Against Youth

It's potent, I'll say that much. I happen to agree with a lot of it.

http://www.esquire.com/print-this/young-people-in-the-recession-0412?page=all

I suspect this passage will divide some:

"It's the dirty little secret of every middle-class person in their mid-thirties: Everybody's parents helped them out. Who do you think is paying for all those summer internships? How many new parents do you think actually have enough money for a Bugaboo stroller, let alone a down payment on a first home? And if you don't have a mom or dad who can help with ballet lessons for the kids or family vacations, God help you. America is becoming what it was founded to reject, what it has resisted throughout its history, a patronage society."

 

I didn't get ballet lessons.

 

Wasn't the agrarian system -- the kind that dominated the first two-thirds of America's history -- the definition of a patronage society?

 

You mean, as in someone was kind enough to buy the stuff you grew? Patrons to your crops? Maybe.

I would suggest the paragraph doesn't take into account slavery. Sadly, America took awhile before it fought strenuously enough against that.

When I think of patronage, I think of the plebes working hard enough to catch the admiration of a rich aristocracy, who then "invests" in their future. Art is produced in this way, or was, for centuries.

 

Does this have anything to do with the bean ballet?

 

My parents have filed bankruptcy. I owe $20K in student loans. They put no money toward my house because they can't even afford to pay for their own. My mom is 62 and working two jobs.

They did buy me a car so I guess I have that going for me.

 

I can only assume we'll have more posts like that one. However, the fact that it didn't happen to you doesn't negate the reality of the trend.

 

I wasn't trying to negate the reality of the trend. I was just saying it's foreign to me.

Why do people on this board consistently act like someone posting their personal tale means they're speaking for society? It's mind-bending to me.

 

I guess what I was clumsily trying to get across was that society was built on the combination of slavery and farms that were usually handed down generation to generation.

I'm wondering if our notion that everyone 150 years ago built their life from scratch isn't ignoring that jobs, land and property were doled out from parents to children. Few people give their children a job, a home and property now. I think parents were more financially giving 150 years ago than they are now.

This sentence stuck out to me:

So we have children living with their parents after they have income, just like they did in the early parts of the twentieth century and before.

 

Our student loan debt's piled.
Some of us have no child.
Depressed and in denial.
We are the youth gone wild
Better learn to dunk a ball.
If you want to retire at all.
This country's 'bout to fall.
We are the youth gone wild.

 

Because people on this board consistently post their personal tale so as to speak for society. Which is similarly mind-bending.

 

Wikipedia says that Stephen Marche, the author of the article, is Canadian.

Obviously this is just some foreigner gloating over an imaginary problem plaguing America.