What follows is adapted from Part 5 of a series on my blog, Perfect Whole, exploring personal experiences and pop culture representations of being different (a "freak") over the past few decades. The series is called "Freaks, Gleeks, Demarites, and Occupy Wall Street"
But what does any of this have to do with Occupy Wall Street? What connects opting out of normalcy, a popular culture that suddenly glorifies freakiness, and a political movement of disaffected young people taking to the streets?
The connecting thread is the social contract of conformity offered to every middle-class American child, which was discovered over the past decade or so to be written on a cloud in invisible ink. The contract read:
Do what is expected of you, following your parents’ and teachers’ instructions as well as you can, and you will be rewarded with security.
People who knew they didn’t fit in examined the social contract and found that they would not be able to hold up their end of it while holding onto their souls. This is not to say that some freaks didn’t grow up to be wildly successful. Some did, but on their own terms, often banding together with other freaks in creative artistic and business partnerships.
When economic times were good, the social contract functioned reasonably well for the middle class. Children who followed social norms and did well in school went to college, majored in something that interested them, and sooner or later found work that paid the bills. They married, had children, and advised those children to take the same deal.
But a number of trends endangered the contract, beginning twenty years ago or more: Corporations downsized and outsourced. The American workforce grew much more efficient. Manufacturing moved overseas. The population increased. Wages stagnated. Then, we suffered a terrorist attack, and a right-wing government rammed through policies that disempowered workers and deified corporations, while the public was too scared of terrorists (and Congresscritters of being called unpatriotic on Fox News) to object.
Gradually, the social contract morphed into this:
Do everything that could possibly be expected of you, much better than the other kids can do it, and you might be rewarded with the chance of staying in the socio-economic class into which you were born. Maybe.
The middle class took note and ramped up the parenting, producing the anxious helicopter parents that everyone loves to mock and no one tries to understand. Helicopter parenting is simply parental love expressed as fear. Adults witnessed in their workplaces how much higher expectations had become since they were young, how much more each employee was expected to produce for lower real wages and less security. They lost their jobs or watched others lose theirs, while the people in the C-suites got richer and more entrenched, whether they succeeded or failed.
Is it any wonder that parents overreacted, and swore that their own children would be survivors and winners? Why else would a sane mother or father sign their children up for town, school and travel teams, some in multiple sports? The kids, at least, get to run around in the fresh air and have some fun before exhaustion and early injuries ruin the fun. For the parents, it’s nothing but expense and commuting. Why else would parents hire ruinously pricey tutors to supplement the instruction in even excellent schools, plus pay for SAT courses and private guidance counselors? Why would parents micromanage a child’s academic career to the extent that some schools felt they had no choice but to use open online gradebooks, so that parents would know the moment a quiz was graded how it affected their child’s GPA and class rank? Why do they urge their kids to participate in as many extra-curricular activities as three students of the previous generation would have managed? What sane person would cut short their children’s childhood, driving them to work harder and longer at younger and younger ages, until sleep deprivation became a widespread health crisis among American youth? Only love and fear could make parents engage in behaviors so patently insane: love for their children and fear for their children’s endangered futures.
These parents and their exhausted kids maintained their ironclad faith in the meritocracy. They believed that whichever Superchildren worked the hardest and achieved the most would still manage to survive in the increasingly competitive global marketplace. But the last few years have shaken that faith. Many recent college graduates, even those with graduate degrees, have found themselves burdened with tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt, unemployed or underemployed, living with their parents, and losing hope. According to Timothy Egan in the New York Times,
Employment rates and starting salaries have fallen off a cliff for new college graduates in the last two years. One study found that 55 percent of humanities majors newly released from school are either not working or hold jobs that require no college degree.
Even those who have found work will never catch up economically. Graduating during a recession depresses wages for most or all of a career. Many of these Organization Kids must be wondering what exactly it was that they traded their childhoods for, and why, if they kept up their end of that scary new social contract, there isn’t even an entry-level job waiting for them at the end.
Normal isn’t looking too good. The crumbs promised in the social contract are too meager to warrant the effort, and rewards of conformity have never seemed less worth trading your soul for. Suddenly, the freaks seem to have the right attitude. With obscene income inequality and high unemployment, even someone who follows all the rules perfectly and does all the extra-credit assignments life offers can still end up with $80,000 in student loan debt, a part-time job at Starbucks, and a room at home decorated with Star Wars posters. Merit may have nothing at all to do with it. And in that case, why not reconnect with the creative, rebellious spirit whose needs were long ago sublimated to the demands of Advanced Placement courses and Community Service Credits? Why not raise your glass and sing along with Pink calling you a dirty little freak?
And if there is a large gathering in your city in which people your age and older (and all over the socio-economic spectrum) are finally standing up and asking what became of the social contract, and why corporations are not only considered people, but people with considerably more rights than actual people, why not dig a sleeping bag out of the attic, make a sign, and join in? Why not announce publicly that you didn’t lose the game? That you played it with all your heart, but it was rigged, and you’re not going to play it anymore? Why not rebel, critique, camp out, speak into the people’s mic, play the drum? What, finally, do you have to lose?
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For those who would like to read the series in its entirety, here are the links:
Part I. Comic-book Geeks
Part II. Madonna and John Hughes
Part III. Demarites
Part IV. Glee, Lady Gaga, and “Raise Your Glass”
Part V. The Wages of Conformity and Occupy Wall Street