SOAPBOX: BELLYACHES FROM ACROSS THE AGE GAP

There’s a certain kind of groan that accompanies the middle of any lecture on how those dern kids, once again, can’t get their act together. It can be audible, sounding like a mix between the response to a bad joke and the response to repetitive manual labor; or it can be silent, the groan of your brain’s motor as it sputters out in exasperation.

I’m acutely aware of this, because I get these lectures all of the time and have experienced both. As a journalist I usually spend hours every day listening to people much older than me explain just how things work—usually mundane things, like what the Parks and Recreation Department budget will be for next year, or who’s running for some local office.

But every once in a while, someone (usually between the ages of 45 and 65) will try to let lose a few nuggets of generational wisdom in my direction regarding young people, the world’s current sorry state, and The Way Things Were Back When Things Were Shiny and Good. These asides will invariably contain at least three of the following:

1. An admonition to be thankful that I have a job at all
2. Criticism of my generation’s laziness
3. Criticism of my generation’s overeagerness/desire to advance up the ranks quickly (often accompanied by #2 [1])
4. Something about me being given too many tiny plastic trophies when I was in elementary school, which means that I must have unrealistic expectations
5. A sarcastic pantomime about smartphone overuse in public settings [2]

Leave it to the fine folks at the Boston Globe to surprise me yet again. In a shot across the generational bow from their Annals of Aged Indignation (also known as the Opinion section, I think), columnist Jennifer Graham recently penned a 700-word screed entitled “A generation of idle trophy kids” which managed to rustle my jimmies by harping only on point #2 :

WORD THAT 6 million young people are not working or studying comes as no surprise to anyone with a millennial in the basement.

While their parents weren’t looking, Generation X gave way to Generation Vex, an amiable, tech-savvy, yet minimally employable crop of Americans who will ultimately need more subsidies than a dairy farmer. Staying on the family health insurance until age 26 is just the beginning.

It’s interesting to hear these same anti-handout arguments traditionally reserved for the poor turned on the young—much like the traditional rant, this rant, too, does not make sense. Six million people out of work or school means that 85 percent of the population that has drawn Graham’s ire is in school or working.

That hardly seems to make us “minimally employable”; in fact, it seems like we’re highly employable! “Minimally employable” would be more like 20 million youngins out there without a job. But I can’t expect someone in the heat of good old fashioned round of ‘Get those kids off my lawn and behind a counter!’ to maintain a sense of perspective, can I? Continue, please.

…as the recession recedes, it’s getting harder to believe we’ve given millennials the skills and, more important, the motivation to provide for themselves. In MTV’s 2012 study on these “No Collar Workers,” half said they’d rather have no job at all than a job they hate.

How did a Boston Globe columnist get away with citing MTV as a reputable source for a study? Is John Henry already putting the screws to their budget so badly that they can’t afford to do more than cherry pick half-baked studies from the same network that brought us My Super Sweet 16, Teen Mom, and a show about Ashton Kutcher trying to prank celebrities?

More importantly, is it surprising that people want to like their job? Just because someone would rather have no job than one they hate in no way indicates that they wouldn’t still work at that shitty job.

Ask someone who’s going to get a drivers license and you can understand this perfectly: you wouldn’t be surprised to hear that someone would rather stay at home eating Cheetos than wait for three hours in line at the DMV, and you certainly wouldn’t call them lazy. You’d probably give them a hug.

But according to Graham, part of the problem is that the elders have given me and my cohort of useless, phone-addicted value suckers too many hugs in the form of vast mansions and free rides:

More so than previous generations, millennials incubated in beauty and comfort and spaciousness unknown to their parents at that age. There was no Rachael Ray or Martha Stewart then. There were no four-car garages, master suites, and cathedral ceilings unless your name was Kennedy or Bush. There was lime-green shag carpeting in ‘50s-style ranches with bedrooms the size of today’s walk-in closets. In quarters that close, kids couldn’t wait to move out at 18, even to the shabbiest of apartments.

Today’s kids simply can’t imagine downsizing to quarters like that. They’re victims of their parents’ success and frustrated that they see no way to replicate it. And why should they, if they’re already livin’ the dream?

They should really open a window in the Globe newsroom; I think the media elite down on William T. Morissey Boulevard are starting to choke on their own rarefied air, and it’s killing their brain cells, allowing the delusion that every Millennial [3] is a spawn of an Athena Healthcare executive living in Newton to sneak in. Where are these “four-car garages” and “cathedral ceilings?” I have a feeling that if Graham took a trip out through Dorchester and Roxbury to interview any of the twentysomethings milling about in central Boston, she’d be hard pressed to find anyone rushing home to meet the chandelier repairman.

I’ll even give her the benefit of the doubt with that one and assume she was exaggerating for effect. But downsize that gross misrepresentation of my supposedly ‘Do-nothing Generation’ to just two garage doors and the problem still stands: American families just aren’t living like that.

Remember, that age of “lime-green shag carpeting in ‘50s-style ranches” was a part of the greatest age of prosperity in American history (mostly for White America, it should be noted), when the middle class grew by leaps and bounds. There were jobs, good jobs, jobs that a young person with few skills and little education could start off at—yes, on the bottom—and feel confident about working their way up. They might have even wanted to work their way up, because their job building a car, or working on an assembly line, or doing something marginally more meaningful than swiping a debit card and handing over a Big Mac showed at least a hint of promise of opportunity down the line.

Fast forward about 50 years. Those jobs are gone, shipped overseas with the last vestiges of that sparkly, Norman Rockwellian American Dream of full employment and stable housing. Wall Street hucksters have contributed to a massive economic collapse that we’re now just beginning to recover from—and not even that much, if you have the good sense to look at underemployment figures instead of unemployment figures.

American productivity (including, yes, us Millenials) has continued to rise, but the actual value of our wages has remained stagnant. The last 10 years have been known as a “lost decade” for wage growth, with wages only 10.7 percent higher in 2011 than they were in 1971. Today, if you live in a state where the minimum wage is the same as the federal minimum wage (as residents of 26 U.S. states do), and you work a minimum wage job (as many Millenials do), the real value of your wage is 7.9 percent less than it was in 1967.

In short: most of our parents are not doing okay, and neither are we. Many of my friends in Boston can’t find a job that pays enough to live in this frustratingly expensive city, and often resort to cramming themselves into tiny apartments with more roommates than square feet just to make due. Either that or sell weed, whatever’s more convenient at the time. Meanwhile, my 60-year-old mother back home in Wisconsin was just barely able to find a job that could pay her bills, working part-time at a vocational high school in Milwaukee—it took her over four months to do it, and when her contract ends in December she’ll have to go back on the hunt yet again.