I was born during the waning days of the Ford Administration, not long before the election, and not long after the bicentennial celebration. I’m smack dab in the middle of one of the ‘tweener micro-generations similar to the President, who is a little too young to really be considered a Boomer and a little too old to really be considered an Xer. Someone called my age cohort Generation Catalano after the Jared Leto character from My So Called Life, but I prefer Generation Kevin Arnold after The Wonder Years character who was living teen angst in a setting twenty years earlier during the late 1980s and early 1990s. In the early 1980s I remember my father and mother routinely complaining about the Reagan Administration. One of the memories of my father most fondly etched into my mind after his demise is the invective tone he had when he complained about Ronnie RayGun. The problems for my generation of Americans, the Millennials who followed, and the Xers who preceded me into adulthood could trace most of their roots back to January 20, 1980 and the inauguration of Ronald Reagan. Interestingly, at least to me is the fact that many of the good things that happened during the 1990s could be traced back to the administration of his 1980 primary competitor who called his trickle down policies “voodoo economics.”
George H. W. Bush was a much better President than his son. He raised taxes in an effort to balance the federal budget, he oversaw a peaceful end of the Cold War, he knew enough to stop US troops in Kuwait at the border of Iraq to avoid creating a power vacuum in the region. He built massive international support for military action he took in defense of Kuwait, but most importantly he signed into law the High Speed Computing and Communications Act of 1992, which was authored by then Senator Albert Gore, Jr. That helped fund the creation of the final pieces of the modern commercial Internet as we know it today, so he really did a great deal to transform the economy following his term in office.
A recession during the early 1980s meant that President Obama and his fellow Jonesers -a term I’ve heard for the micro-generation he belongs to- faced some very tough economic times during their early adulthood. By the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s after a brief upward tick in the economy, the Savings and Loan Crisis, a Wall Street driven industrial mergers and acquisitions boom fueled by the Drexel Bernham Lambert leverage buyout and junk bonds had started the deindustrialization of America. Once again, thanks to deregulatory measures at the SEC under the direction of Reagan appointees the country ended the decade with another severe recession. By 1989, Michael Moore was making “Roger & Me” about the first demise of Flint, Michigan.
The rust belt had begun its decline along with rural America. All of that flyover country in the rural South, Midwest, Great Plains and the Mountain States that is generally represented in Congress by Republicans started a long decline that it has not recovered from during the late 1970s, but it was accelerated by Reagan deregulation during the 1980s that allowed for the leveraged buyout. The consolidation this practice funded was phase one of the deindustrialization of the United States. Those in my generation and the preceding Gen Xers lucky enough to be born in or move to one of the right cities and fall into the right group of people made a fair amount of money during the 1990s. If you lived in Austin, Texas, Seattle, Washington, Portland, Oregon, or the San Francisco Bay region and knew anything about computers there was a very good chance that the 1990s treated you very well.
If you lived in a small town like Wyoming, Illinois, Tunkhannock, Pennsylvania, or Murphy, North Carolina, the chance of you finding a good paying job were not all that great. In rural America and the rust belt, the great decline continued, and while there were new jobs, 22 million new jobs as former President Clinton loves to cheer about, most of those jobs were not good jobs. Walmart came to your town and hired 150 people, but the factory where 65 people made 4x the wage making whatever widget we used to make in your neck of the woods closed up shop after he signed NAFTA into law, or after Permanent Normalized Trading Status was granted to China. The odds were pretty good that your locally owned mill closed down when a big corporate competitor bought the machinery and shipped your job to China or Mexico. The good news was that for every Walmart that opened up, two or three fast food joints usually followed, each one providing as many jobs as the old factory, but again at a quarter of the old factory’s wages. The handful of factories that remained open saw competition for jobs spike and the best workers of the Boomer generation generally shuffled from the closed factories into the handful that remained open, while the shiftless workers at those companies were shown the door. They usually ended up as greeters at the Walmart or line cooks at McDonald’s. Of course there wasn’t any room for Generation Kevin Arnold at those factories that stayed open, and there were very few jobs even at the Walmart available to Generation Kevin Arnold. Gen Xers had taken those jobs as quickly as they could because there really wasn’t anything better available, so Generation Kevin Arnold went to college during most of the mid to late 1990s.
When Generation Kevin Arnold finished college, it had very few choices, move to one of the go go boom cities of the late 1990s to pursue millions of dollars working at a startup dot com, or return to rust belt or rural America, or maybe move to a city that showed some promise, but wasn’t quite the go go boom town. In one of the slower to develop cities there were still some not so great jobs available making coffee, tending bar, or doing something else on the side while you made art, or learned about how the Internet worked. Then the dot com bubble burst, the election of 2000 dragged on for an extra month, the Wall Street traders orchestrated another fleecing, and the economy really hit the skids after the attacks in 2001. The Xers and the members of Generation Kevin Arnold who had jobs, or who had been lucky enough to go to graduate school and become a professional of some kind started buying over-priced houses from Boomers looking to sell, and some Boomers who had never been able to buy before started buying over-priced houses with really bad mortgage deals that Wall Street decided to pawn off on unsuspecting investors to make their next killing after the dot com bust. Interest rates went up as an anemic recovery began, and the biggest crash since the 1920s hit the world economy. 14 million people ended up out of work.
The Gen Xer’s kids were in high school or just starting college, the first of the Boomers were starting to retire, and in the handful of factories that remained open in the rust belt and rural America, the Xers kids may have gotten the job their grandparents used to have through a whole lot of nepotism as those retirements began, but the vast majority of those Millennials were competing with their Xer parents for even less jobs than existed when their parents first got their start in the adult world. When the Xers started looking for their first jobs, teenagers worked at McDonald’s. When the Millennials started looking for work, people with families were working at McDonald’s. What is worse, when the Xers started looking for their first jobs, there were grocery stores, and small mom and pop shops and diners all over even the poorest rural areas and the poor inner cities. Today, there isn’t a grocery store in the City of Flint Michigan with a population of a hundred thousand people. How is that even possible?
The crappy jobs that let the Xers get by have disappeared. The luckiest members of Generation X or Generation Kevin Arnold became accountants, nurses, doctors, dentists, and lawyers, the next luckiest group figured out early on that things were screwed, at least in rural America and rust belt America. They bought a pickup truck, got it fitted with a plow, bought a riding lawnmower and a trailer and hung a shingle for themselves. They became jacks of many trades earning a living plowing snow in the winter, cutting lawns in the summer, and doing construction work whenever they could. Their wives learned to cut hair and bought a chair in a salon.
In certain cities the luckiest of the lucky members of Generation X, Generation Kevin Arnold, and the Millennials are still working in startup technology companies, or even established technology companies, but those are the exception, not the rule. Of course the drawback to living in one of those go go boom cities is that rents are through the roof, and the chance to own a home is almost non-existent even with one of the better salaries. These coder types are paid well, but living expenses and student loans eat up so much of most of their salaries, that stories about young Google employees figuring out that living in a van in the company parking lot might just be the only way to get out of debt and regain some semblance of freedom. A freedom that was so common for the Boomer generation that in their twenties they could quit a job in the morning and have a new one that afternoon paying more than they used to earn.
Baby Boomers bought houses for less than a Millennial will likely pay for their first car. Some Boomers received free educations from great public universities like UC Berkeley because as a land grant college, tuition was supposed to be free. Boomers faced a recession during the 1970s, but there were still factories, and we still made things. There were still jobs that people could support a family on. As a member of Generation Kevin Arnold, by the time I finished graduate school and passed the bar exam, my first job as an attorney offered a salary of $35,000.00 a year, $20K a year less than my father a Boomer mechanic earned. To obtain that job, Over $150K in college and graduate education was required, and with the number of hours worked to make $35,000 a year, I earned about $8.25 per hour BEFORE taxes. Which meant at the end of the day, I would have been better off to work at McDonald’s like the friends who didn’t go to college. More than a decade after finishing law school, I’ve never earned as much as my father earned during his highest earning years at the end of his mechanic’s career. Don’t get me wrong, there are some attorneys who have done very well, but not one member of my graduating class who is still practicing law has earned over $80K in a year, and being an attorney is supposed to be one of the good jobs. It’s one of the things people are taught as children to aspire to be when they grow up. Why are even the lawyers so broke? Because clients and potential clients have no money to pay them. It is really simple. While there is some demand, there is no money amongst the majority of potential clients. The one exception amongst law school classmates went into construction contracting, instead of law after law school. He and his brother started a company that installs solar panels, and they are now each worth about $12 million. The law degree did come in handy, it helped him help his clients receive tax incentives for their solar installations.
I Have Explained All of That so That You Can Understand the Generational Mindset I Come From
The Boomers were old enough to vote in 1980 and in 1984, and 1988, and 1992. The Boomers elected Reagan and both Bushes, and Clinton. In 2004 I was under 30, and voters under thirty voted OVERWHELMINGLY for John Kerry. My generation voted overwhelmingly for President Obama along with the Millennials behind us. My generation on Monday night voted overwhelmingly along with the Millennials behind us for Bernie Sanders. The Polls show that Bernie has my generation and Millennial’s votes overwhelmingly all over the country. Bernie isn’t a Boomer. Bernie is part of another one of those lost ‘tweener generations like myself and President Obama. While Bernie marched with the desegregationists and the anti-war hippies, instead of becoming a Yuppie in the 1980s or becoming a middle manager at some company that shipped jobs to China during the 1990s, Bernie railed against all of those things that destroyed the American middle class from the day Ronald Reagan came into office, right up until today.
I am part of Generation Screwed, its the much larger generation of Americans whose future was stolen away from them by Boomers who didn’t get involved and didn’t prevent the dismantling of the American middle class. Generation Screwed includes Generation Kevin Arnold. It includes Generation X. To a degree it includes President Obama’s micro generation of Jonesers. It definitely includes the Millennials, and it even includes Generation 9/11, some of whom are going to be eligible to vote this year -you know those kids born at the tail end of the Clinton Administration and the beginning of the second Bush Administration. Generation Screwed has been getting screwed over by the American plutocracy all of our lives. We have not had a five year stretch in adulthood without an economic catastrophe, at least not if we lived outside of certain boom cities, and Generation Screwed is completely fucking feed up. Generation Screwed is going to vote for Bernie because what he is proposing is the only thing that might, just might put this country back on track to give the next generation a chance at a life better than the one we have all had. Of course what he is proposing is just a starting point to setting things right. We all know that. We know it in our marrow. What Bernie is proposing doesn’t go nearly far enough! Yeah, that’s right, I said it, what he is proposing doesn’t go nearly far enough. Bernie is our half-measure, our opening salvo at fixing the fucking mess that the Boomer’s post-Watergate apathy, post-Kennedy and King assassination apathy gave us. That’s right, I get it, I know why you folks didn’t continue the struggle, your leaders were slaughtered. Guess what, it happens, you pick up where they left off and you keep pushing. You have to pick up where they left off and keep pushing. Bernie did that, and its why we respect him. The man kept up the fight. While you fuckers gave up and went home, he kept up the fight. Well I have news for you, fall in line behind us or get ready to be run over, because this is Generational Warfare and your generation who keeps voting for a woman who has been smack dab at the center of the problem most of her adult life is not who we are going to vote for, if with your last grasp of power you decide that she is to be the nominee of the Democratic Party, the one party left that can fix this country, then I for one am dedicated to full on Generational Warfare. What does that mean. It means Generation Screwed will finally fight back. We are trying to fix it for everyone, but if Hillary is the nominee of the Democratic Party. Generation Screwed will either stay home on election day, or Generation Screwed will vote for a fellow member of our Generation. Our Generation doesn’t have exclusively people who fell on The Beatles side of the equation when asking if you liked The Beatles or Merle Haggard in the 1960s to put it in terms that you understand. There are a bunch of us who fell on the Haggard side of the coin too. Most of us on The Beatles side of the equation hate those fucks every day of the week and twice on Sunday, but guess what, if the choice is between Secretary Clinton and Marco Rubio, enough of us are going to go pull a lever for Rubio to take away your Social Security checks.
You have been warned. Don’t say you haven’t been warned.