The young will inherit a future they see as a sham (2,619 words)

[Newsjock]

Source: Toronto Star

... He fits into a population cohort that David Herle, one of Canada’s best known political strategists and a corporate consultant on branding and reputation, has labelled the Spectators, so-called because its members aren’t engaged — at least in traditional ways — with the society around them, and see little point in trying to influence the course of events unfolding in their country and the world.

... At the core of the Spectators’ alienation, says Herle, is a feeling of a lack of control over the direction of their lives. They do not think that life has offered them many opportunities, and they do not feel they can influence their financial or personal direction. “They see themselves as corks bobbing in the water, pushed and pulled where the tides take them,” Herle wrote in Policy Options last fall.

... Hand in hand with political mistrust is economic pessimism — the fear of middle class and young Canadians that their futures are dark, that the Millennials will be the first generation of Canadians to do worse economically than their parents. And, as a corollary, that inequality is becoming the norm in Canada, with a small group of uber-rich grabbing an ever-increasing share of the country’s wealth while everyone else either goes nowhere or slides backward.

... This is a society losing its glue. How far down the road before it bubbles to the surface? British sociologist Michael Mann once wrote that social cohesion is not marked by a society of common values but by a society that can tolerate conflicting values.

... What’s truly interesting — and even spooky — about them is that, for the most part, it is not apathy, not ignorance, not the generational aberrations that accompany being young, that shape their beliefs and values but a concrete rejection of established social institutions coupled with fear that the Western idealized dream of progress forever is dead and that what’s coming down the road toward them, economically and socially, is not nice.

Read more: http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2013/12/08/suppose_they_threw_an_election_and_nobody_came.html

[Earth_First]

1. "Spectators"

How quaint.

[bemildred]

2. "This is a society losing its glue."

Exactly. When you become emphatic about the government's lack of concern for the views of its citizens, you may expect a similar lack of concern about the government on their part.

[Igel]

5. The glue used to be civil society.

Not so much these days. More of a model that has two parties, population and government, instead of more diverse sort of structure with the population, a range of important organizations of varying sizes and functions, and government.

[bemildred]

6. Divide and rule politics does have its down side, and so does monopoly-oriented economic policy.

And we've been wallowing in both since Vietnam, with the result being a politically and economically much-weaker nation, deeply divided and at war with itself and most everybody else too. Hubris and folly.

And our good friends up North seem to want to follow us, for some reason.

[grilled onions]

3. Can Parents Deny That Their Children's Future Will Be One Huge Challenge?

It wasn't that many decades ago when jobs were everywhere and even an 8th grade drop out could secure a job that was good enough to buy a car,a home and feed a family. Today armed with a college education(or even a second college degree) many struggle to find any job. Kids are still living at home,pushing the age of thirty. They can't afford a car or don't want the responsibility knowing their job could be cut off at a moments notice. They see no security in their future. They can't plan ahead. Their wages are laughable if not downright sad. It can barely pay for rent(and that's with sharing the rent with another). Many see little reason to go further in debt for more schooling when the only jobs out there are for flipping burgers,being a delivery person or cashier. None of these jobs offer enough in wages to get you an apartment, never the less get you to save nor pay off student loans.
They see that dream getting farther away. They see more money going into fewer pockets and that being born into wealth or having extremely good connections is the only way to get you that cushy life. No longer is the old saying "If you work hard enough you can get it." For many how hard you work has little to do with getting a job or keeping a job.

[4dsc]

4. Coming soon to a neighborhood near you.

This will become prevalent in the US and around the world as resources become more scarce. The age of abundance is over. Consumerism killed the world.

[struggle4progress]

7. A significant chunk of the population has felt this way for as long as I can recall

Thinking back to the "Beat Generation" -- that name reflects the sense of being completely beaten -- or to the slogan "Drop Out" a decade later, I see nothing new: a huge number of people were similarly demoralized by working conditions in the early 20th century or by WWI -- which simply smashed the myth of inevitable human progress by putting science/technology to work in pointless mass slaughter -- or by the Great Depression

Alienation, of course, is real: it was recognized, much more than a century ago, as a feature of our civilization. It will not be abolished by mere disappointment or by wishful thinking. Our task is not to indulge our emotional responses to the problems of our time. Nor is it our task to understand, once and for all, whether our position is hopeless. Our task is to try to understand whatever prospects we actually have of moving ahead, even if we must take two steps backwards to move three steps forward