Squashed

Yesterday I wrote about the difficulty many people are facing graduating into an ailing economy and an an over-saturated job market. I was particularly frustrated by the way some the same people that screwed up that economy stereotype an entire generation as lazy, entitled, and generaly whiny if they act upset.

I did not mean to suggest that education is not worthwhile or that people should spend their high school and college years focusing on what they think will make them most desirable to their first employer out of school rather than what they love. Technology and globalization are transforming industries. In twenty years, whatever practical skills you pick up today may be about as useful as the ability to operate a punchcard machine or write in shorthand. But creative thinking and the ability to apply the lessons of one discipline to another will help you your entire life (and make you popular at dinner parties). And even being passionate about something you love makes finding a standard 9-5 a bit challenging, at least you get to be passionate about something you love.

At this point, I should apologize. I’m about to start spouting aphorisms. I’m a strong believer in the long-term value of a liberal arts education—even if the immediate return on investment looks rather grim. Times are tough—but they won’t be tough forever. And if they are tough forever, we’ll need creative problem-solvers more than experienced mid-level managers.

Many recent graduates did everything right and still find themselves unemployed, uninsured, and uncertain. This doesn’t mean that they should drown in regret. The economy contracted, and they got squeezed out the bottom. In a society that too often conflates worth with earnings (and in the not-to-distant past criminalized idleness) this can be pretty crushing for somebody used to excelling at everything. (On the upside, getting over yourself is a virtue. On the downside, it’s no fun.) Despite these difficulties, a solid education is personally and socially valuable, even when it is not lucrative.

The solution is not to spend fewer resources on education. If the job-market is currently saturated, adding more people to it won’t help. Nor, as I wrote yesterday, is the solution to disparage the twenty-somethings. Sure, the older generations survived their twenties—but not in an economic climate like this. What worked ten years ago doesn’t work anymore. When considering policies that affect younger people, let’s not fall back on easy and unjust stereotypes. There is room to disagree on what the best policies are—but let’s not pretend that the twenty-somethings who feel that they got screwed are just whiners. They did in fact get screwed.

If you’re still in school—keep doing all the things you’re supposed to be doing. A burnished diploma and a stellar GPA may not get you as far as you had hoped—but it will open a lot more doors than it will close. (Besides, we didn’t stay up all night studying because we wanted to land a job. We did it because we are competitive bastards.) You’re not alone in this mess—so you might as well make the best of it.

From the Tea Parties to threats to “boycott Obamacare,” it looks like not paying your taxes is becoming cool again. While it’s an absurd thing to do in this situation, not paying your taxes has a long and noble history. Quakers, as avowed pacifists, sometimes deduct and escrow a percentage of their taxes that would pay for war. (The IRS does not approve.)

Perhaps the most famous tax-avoider was Thoreau. If you think of him simply as a friendly outdoorsey guy who like ponds and simple things, reread Walden. He was probably a lot more radical and a lot more awesome than you remember. He decided that he couldn’t pay taxes to any country that allowed slavery and fought wars of aggression. Furthermore, he wanted to opt out of that country’s economy. Hence, Walden. Thoreau ended up in jail for refusing to pay his taxes. Emerson eventually paid them for him (over his objections).

Before following Thoreau’s example, we ought to figure out why we don’t want to pay our taxes. Would we still refuse to pay when threatened with jail? If not, perhaps we’re taking a stand on self-interest, not principle. And what is the grand injustice we’re protesting? Hopefully it’s not that we don’t like paying taxes. And hopefully it’s not that we don’t like some policy proposal. I can understand a refusal to pay taxes over something like war or slavery. Healthcare reform, however, isn’t even close.

Apparently people in their 20s are a bunch of entitled whiners. I also hear we’re afraid of hard work. I’m rather sick of hearing it. Of course we have a sense of entitlement—we had an understanding with the older generation. We followed through with our half of the deal. What happened?

The word “entitlement” has picked up a negative connotation it shouldn’t have. If you go to the bank and deposit $20, you are entitled to get your $20 from the bank. If you fulfill your half of a contract, you are entitled to the other party’s performance. Sure, its a problem when you feel you deserve something you don’t deserve—but there is nothing wrong with acknowledging a legitimate debt. So let’s ask why some people in their 20s might feel the older generation hasn’t kept its end of the bargain. Let’s talk a bit about generational justice.

Our parents told us a number of things. Stay in school. Study hard. Stay off drugs. Keep your grades up. Get into the best college there is. Be the best at everything you do. Learn. Research. Excel. For me, the all-nighters doing homework started in seventh grade. School followed by extra-curriculars would start a bit before 8:00 in the morning and, for some parts of the year, could run until 9:00 or 10:00 at night. Then I started studying. Through college, commitments might go until well after midnight. Do all of this now, we were told, and when you finally graduate there will be a job for you. It may not be easy. Nobody is handing anything to you on a silver platter and you might get some dirt under your fingernails. But we had an understanding. There is, we are told, a rational system, and if we are smart enough and work hard enough, things will turn out okay. Will you achieve all of your dreams? Realistically, maybe not—but you should at least be comfortable. So what happens after graduation?

Congratulations, graduate! Go out and take on the world. What? No job? Surely you applied? You interviewed? Maybe you’re being unrealistic. Have you considered temp agencies? Retail? They’re flooded as well? Have you called? Dropped in in person? Pounded the proverbial pavement? Have you tried working your network? Is that really a stack of a hundred rejection letters? You must be doing something wrong.

For those who just graduated, there was no job. That’s not technically true. There was a job—but somebody older has it and isn’t letting go. It turns out the whole system is rigged. Education and intelligence and everything we were told was important turn out to be worth nothing next to seniority and experience.

Maybe the system was relatively fair twenty or thirty years ago—but it certainly isn’t now. Maybe there was a time, relatively recently, when young job seekers could weigh different offers or meaningfully negotiate salaries. When things got tough, that was the first thing to go. As the economy contracts there is a larger and larger focus on protecting people who already have jobs—or those who have recently lost them. Extending unemployment benefits won’t help recent graduates. In today’s economy, seniority is more important than merit. And through all of this, the wealth gap keeps expanding.

Sure, the economy is tough. Nobody meant for this to happen. People screwed up. Accidents happen. Normally, if you bungle something up and can’t fulfill your end of a bargain, you would and try to make it right. You broke it? Fix it. Or at least look embarrassed. That hasn’t happened. I turns out, we’re just whiners. We did everything that was asked of us … and when the older generations don’t deliver their half of the bargain, it’s somehow our fault.

Take health insurance. Decades of pressure to lower wages for new hires and cut benefits means that the employer-provided system means that even if you can find a job, it probably won’t offer health insurance. Paying for insurance out of pocket is prohibitively expensive if you’re healthy and coverage is entirely unavailable if you’re not. And if you have a minimum-wage job serving coffee, you’re still getting a chunk taken out of your paycheck to finance a program that won’t be solvent by the time you’re old enough to use it. But any effort to change this system is met with seniors screaming about communists taking away their medicare. And if 20-somethings back a legislative initiative that would help them obtain coverage, they’re slackers living in their parents basements. And let’s not even get into the individual mandate in the health-reform bill that will require the healthy and young to subsidize the healthcare of their older and generally wealthier parents.

Should twenty-somethings who have done everything asked of them their entire lives feel like somebody pulled one over on them? Probably—but bad things happen. And hopefully all those years of education taught us enough empathy not to be vindictive. Call us gullible—but don’t call us lazy or selfish.  If some of us push for a few reforms that could help us succeed even when our parents have dropped the ball—back them, and be thankful that we’re not talking outright revolution.

But most of all, don’t blame the twenty-somethings for their dissatisfaction. When some asshole like Reuben Navarette writes, “We already knew they had a sense of entitlement from the narcissism they exhibit,” I can only think of one response:

Fuck you.

Jay Cost thinks Obama has misread his mandate. Both the public option and the climate change bill are running into serious problems in the senate. Cost accuses Obama of writing bills that “write bills that excite the left, infuriate the right, and scare the center.” Where exactly does he think the center is? Under the current system of bizarre rules, it takes 60 votes to get through the Senate. All of these Obama’s plans easily have 50 votes. Additionally, the Democrats disproportionately represent the most populous states. They have seven of the ten senators from the top five most populous states and twenty-one of the thirty senators from the top fifteen. A very solid majority of the country supports Obama’s plans. A bill’s difficulty in getting those last few Senate votes may show that it is controversial—but not that it lacks popular support. Obama did not misread his mandate.

There are, however, two outstanding questions. Did Obama misread his support in the senate? And should the Senate change its rules to prevent 40 senators from holding up progress? Should it really nearly enough support to override a Presidential veto to get a bill past?

If airplanes had never advanced past the Wright brothers’ now-archaic efforts, they might still be cool—but they wouldn’t be particularly useful. The wimpy Civil Rights Act of 1957 needed to be strenghthened by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Social Security Act had similar problems. Even our Constitution, as originally written, was a seriously flawed document. That’s right—I just said the Constutition sucked. (If anybody has a hard time accepting this slur on our national mythologies, we can talk about the complete lack of a Bill of Rights and the inclusion of things like the 3/5 compromise. With a few hundred years of ammendments and interpretation, it’s a whole lot better.)

I found this editorial on healthcare reform by Jonathan Alter particularly persuasive. He argues that however imperfect the healthcare bill is, it will definitively state that we think healthcare should be universal. If portions of it don’t work as well as intended, fixing it is easy enough. The big effort is to get that declaration that we believe everybody, regardless of health or means, should have access to affordable medical care.

There are plenty of things to find discouraging in the current bill—but if we can pass something that’s not a complete disaster, we can fix it later. When we’ve definitively said that we don’t want anybody to die in this country for a lack of basic medical care, perhaps the Just-Say-No-ers will quiet down enough that we can talk about what to do about out-of-control costs.

The PC-USA, in true Presbyterian fashion, has a subcommittee of a committee studying the issue of same-gender, covenanted partnerships. They sought input from members. This was my contribution.

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Dear Committee Members:

I was happy to hear that the General Assembly Special Committee to Study Issues

of Civil Union and Christian Marriage is asking the place of covenanted same-gender partnerships in the Christian community. It is a question that has been close to my heart and mind over the past years, and I would like to share what little grace I have found. I have struggled with the issue, not because it is particularly complex or personal, but because people I respect come down passionately on both sides.

The question of what is marriage and what is its place in the Christian community should not be dismissed with a trivially simple response. Nor should the sincerity of those with opposing views be flippantly dismissed. While I believe the Bible unequivocally calls for the full inclusion and participation of all people, regardless of sexual orientation, others strongly disagree. (Ironically, both sides accuse the other of abandoning scriptural teaching to enforce some political or social norm). I hope that we can disagree without demeaning the faith or sincerity of those on the other side.

What is the place of covenanted same-gender partnerships in the Christian community? I think it is helpful to ask instead, what is the place of BGLT people in the church? While we have no authority to retract or extend the grace of the gospel, we have the ability to make others feel welcome or unwelcome. And we can open our communities to others, regardless of where they are coming from—or we first can demand that they remake themselves in our image before being fully included.

As such, I would urge three things. Firstly, listen to those we disagree with. It is easy to insist on the theological prohibition of something we have no interest in to begin with. For perspective, we need to listen to those who want the church to recognize and covenant their same-gender partnerships. If the church decides to continue denying same-sex, covenanted relationships, who bears the cost? My relationship with my wife is, perhaps, the greatest joy in my life. I lack the hubris to demand somebody else deny a similar relationship with their partner in order to be fully included in the church community. Do we fully understand the cost of continued discrimination? Secondly, recognize that there are people of faith on both sides of the issue. Pretending that one side or the other is insufficiently committed to following Jesus helps nobody. Thirdly, the committee should advocate for the recognition of covenanted same-gender partnerships in the Christian community. I am quite persuaded that that this is the morally and scripturally sound approach. I am also aware that others strongly disagree. So I wonder, what happens if we get it wrong?

In both cases, we’re unable to change what covenants God recognizes. Whether we deny relationships God has covenanted or covenant relationships God has not, God will remain faithful to us. Similarly, if the church is wrong on a doctrinal matter, this will only add one more issue to the long list of errors the church has made. And, with time and grace, we will correct the error.

But wrongly refusing to recognize same-sex covenanted relationships would compromise our ability to spread the gospel. We can say that everybody is welcome in our churches. I would not feel welcome or included in a church that refused to recognize my marriage. Why would others?

This is the hottest week of the summer for Michigan—and as the temperature climbs in my unairconditioned study, I cannot help but think of Jonah’s anger at God when the vine that had shaded him for a day wilted and died. When we are confident in our own righteousness, it is easy to lose perspective. It is easy to forget that God extends his love to everybody—even those we have not welcomed into our hearts and our communities. Let us not be as Jonah, so focused on our own prejudices and our own comforts that we miss what God is doing around us or ignore what God has called us to do.

It looks like the infamous “death panel” provision should be removed from the Senate Healthcare Bill. Of course, the provision actually being removed has nothing to do with “death panels” and was an uncontroversial measure about consulting doctors about things like powers of attorney and hospice care until some not-so-bright people got themselves confused. And now, to avoid appease the idiots, the Senate Finance Committee has struck the clause. Go screaming ignorance!

It’s actually a strange thing. If we had a strong antihospice lobby or a group of people who knew what the provision was about and wanted it removed, I would have no problem with the compromise. I think it was a fine provision. I think it could have saved a lot of families a lot of stress at an already difficult time. But I don’t want to hold up the entire bill if others are strongly opposed.

Perhaps this shouldn’t bother me. Perhaps this is a compromise with the emotions of some of the screamers. Perhaps they need some sort of victory—even if it’s entirely imaginary. We make concessions for every other group in the country. Is there anything wrong with making a concession for the ignorant?