Notes

[feuervogel]

I may have something to say about this poor middle class girl's problems at some point. Just putting it here so I can find it again later.

Comments

[feuervogel]

Cat is 5-10 years younger than us, and was in college when the tech bubble burst.

The issues she discusses are real, but she presents her upbringing as this sort of universal experience, and ... no. That wasn't my experience at all. This thread makes an attempt to get at that, and Cat sort of brushes it off.

That people in the past could help younger generations is mostly a function of class. The only reason I didn't grow up in a housing project was because my grandfather has a PhD and worked for NIH. My family had one generation of upward mobility (factory workers/farmers -> PhD) then one generation back down (secretary, mechanic). My generation is the same level as our parents, for the most part, except 3/4 of us have college degrees & they don't.

Her "expectations to go to college, buy a big house, keep it spotless" are so foreign to me they may as well be from Mars.

[leora.livejournal.com]

Ah, yeah. If she's expecting everyone to be able to buy a house, that's ridiculous. If she's just focusing on a downward trend, she's not totally off base. Her expectations are based on class.

When I said the older generation needs to help the younger, I didn't mean from family to family really. I mean more that we need to do things like make college accessible to everyone the way high school is supposed to be and is still more accessible than college. That sort of thing. The culture needs to adapt.

After all, I totally support tax systems that help people get a better start in life. But a lot of people view things like a college education or health care or food to eat as luxuries that we shouldn't be giving poorer kids, and the odds really are further stacked against them than they used to be if they are white. It's a different picture though for other races and more complex. I'm not sure how it all plays out. On the one hand, the laws tend to be less racially biased and jobs may still be biased, but the bias has decreased. On the other hand, the criminal justice system is definitely racially biased. But it was before too. I just don't know enough to say. But I do know those nice housing opportunities weren't going to Black families generally.

I do worry though. We are in the midst of a huge economic crisis, and it is hitting the people who have just come out of high school and are looking for jobs or those who have been able to go to college but just got out really hard. My nieces are young adults, and the job market is a disaster for their age. There are too many people with more experience who are out of work. It's an incredibly hard time to be a young adult. Much harder than I think it was for my age group. Although, I admit, my concerns aren't about whether they will be able to buy houses. I don't want to see my niece having to go through something like I did where she's struggling to get enough money just to stay alive and keep a roof over her head and the heads of her family. And she pretty much already is in that situation, but it's more a question of how on the edge will that become and for how long? It will only take one unlucky break for her to be screwed for years. So, I'm sitting here really hoping she doesn't end up with any.