Mistaking Truth For Disenchantment

Unlike other countries, including Canada, President Obama has been searching for ways to empower those under 35 years of age. There are solutions, he is being advised, but the problem is that older Americans vote against any relief measures. The numbers tell the tale. The rise in wealth for older Americans increased by 42% in the last 25 years, while the drop in wealth for younger Americans fell 68%. That’s close to the bottom falling out.The story only gets more troubling when anyone desiring to make a change discovers that the government spends $2.4 on the elderly for every $1 spent on a child. Somehow the system has become inverted, with wealth accruing to those soon to pass off the scene instead of to those with most of their life ahead of them. Repeatedly, when Americans have had the chance to reverse this course, they have opted for the party and leader that best protects their holdings instead of those promising to invest in the next generation. Not only are the Boomers failing to guarantee future economic health, democracy itself has failed to come to the rescue of the Gen Xers and the New Millennials. No wonder they react by opting out.It’s not just democracy that’s failing. Around the world the younger generations are facing a similar fate. The Arab Spring was largely fueled by young people who increasingly realized the future had escaped them. Youth unemployment in places like Russia and China, even Japan, mirror the same problems.Why is the problem seemingly so universal, when each culture is different? Globalization forms part of the problem. The international financial system has consistently constructed itself in such a way that wealth moves increasingly upwards, leaving not just the destitute behind but post-secondary educated and able young minds as well. At very few points in the development of the new international financial order did anyone raise a clear voice as to how hope was being stolen from the young. And the longer the financial order maintains its course, even older middle-class individuals are facing bleaker futures, as wealth gets concentrated into fewer and fewer hands at the very top 1%.It’s clear that the corporate world has largely feasted on the vulnerabilities of the young. Each day many corporations employ thousands of young, keeping them in poorer working conditions that their parents would have never accepted. The terms “minimum wage” and “young employee” become virtually synonymous. The number of university graduates presently working in minimum wage jobs is on the rise. And for some reason Canadian citizens accept this as perfectly natural. A generation that could come out of high school and find a permanent job has deemed it acceptable to watch as modern economies keep young Canadians jumping from one job to another in repeated fashion, with little real chance of financial growth. Just at the time when companies require university degrees at the very least, the price of post-secondary education itself is quickly falling out of reach. Post-secondary schooling is almost exclusively about finding a slot in the workforce and has little to do with lifelong learning or the skills required to just become a better-developed human being. In a university and college town like London, Ontario, such an approach has created a youthful cohort that increasingly envisions a bleaker future than they imagined. Every city has many such stories to tell.Talk to students at any of the bars, volunteering at a social agency, or desperately seeking summer employment and the story is forever the same: options are getting more limited. They commonly complain in a manner unique to youth, bringing to mind Jean Paul Sartre’s prescient observation that, “Like all young dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.” It’s as natural to student life as beer and music.But the reality now is precisely the opposite -  disenchantment now is truth, as future prospects fade over the horizon. They should be entering the most productive period of their lives - innovation, expansion, family, accruing of wealth - but instead the cupboard appears bare and the older generation raided the fridge.There is no easy way to describe this growing awareness of the young that they will likely never attain the financial security of their parents. It’s a sobering thought and causes the Gen Xers and the Millennials to encapsulate their frustration with this awareness in their music, friends, and different outlooks for how they would establish businesses or bring up families. People with limited options often seek to create their own culture that better provides them access and gives them meaning. This is what the Occupy movement was about in its essence - the desire for a society that provided more opportunity for those outside the moneyed class. What they were doing essentially was taking on the champions of a financially segregated society and those they truly hoped to support their movement - the Boomers - didn’t show up. There was, however, in the consciences of millions of Boomers, a latent sense of guilt that they had somehow failed the next generation on their path to prosperity.Place the blame wherever you like; it doesn’t matter. What is required is a renewed belief that our civic duty is to invest in the generations that come after us. We have already taken enough of their future for our pursuits and its time to return it to its rightful and future owners. That's how the Boomer parents looked after them.