You know, the thing that irked me about him possibly the most- run-of-the-mill bigotry is, at the end of the day, something that will be safely ignored, after all- is that there was one issue on which he was, on one level, entirely right, just for entirely wrong reasons, and that's the American family. Now, don't get me wrong- the reason the American family is going through trouble at the moment isn't gay people marrying, and it's certainly not welfare. It's the fact that America has taken the '50s suburban dream and the assumption that any generation is going to be better off than its parents to its logical conclusion, in which any generation must be better off than its parents, and the danger has just intensified as secure, well-paid blue-collar manufacturing jobs which just required a high school diploma have been replaced by better-paid, but less secure office jobs that require ever-increasing levels of education. There's also his bashing of single mothers. Well, Mr. Santorum, we're now in an age where mom can support a kid, and fairly prosperously, too. Still, if the idea of fidelity to one's partner is something we want to uphold, not something I'm against by any means, let's figure out why it's failing- I suspect it's more the fault of us guys than the womenfolk.
My father, for example, is the chair of the history department at a nationally-respected prep school in a major American city. That means the family (happily un-divorced and at no point near it) can afford to send me, since we get half off tuition plus a pretty good need-based aid package. So I'm growing up around rich kids, often the sons and daughters of executives or the owners of prosperous small business chains. Although they don't show it, my (senior) classmates are getting back their college replies, and I'm certain that a number of them go home and have severe breakdowns because they didn't get into an Ivy. My plans are to become an academic involved with either foreign languages or (hopefully) linguistics, and academics aren't really subjected to the ups and downs of the job market in quite the same way; the job market for most profs is always bad, the job market for people who speak multiple languages [especially Portuguese, Mandarin, Arabic, etc.] almost always good, and neither of these are really influenced by recessions very much. Even so, like everyone in my age group, my biggest worry is having a decent job when I'm 30 years old. My parents, of course, having secure jobs and having grown up in the postwar economic boom decades, tell me not to worry about it too much. They may be right- America, luckily, doesn't idolize working for the same company your entire life like Japan does, which created an entire generation of parent-dependent NEETs who couldn't find a job once the '90s recession hit. Even so, the idea of working for 9 or 10 bucks an hour at age 30 because there's nothing better is a very real fear for my generation, and one we should address. My more cynical side would reply that if you're going to go to college to get a good job, get a degree in something for which jobs are plentiful. That's easy for me to say, being a budding polyglot who sneers at majors in "leisure studies", but we were promised collectively, as a generation, that there would be jobs available for the MBAs we took on tens of thousands of dollars of debt to acquire. Nobody's at fault, really, not even the Baby Boomers- you can't really hold an entire generation at fault collectively, even if they've probably screwed the pooch on global warming and are obstructing dialogue about what to do with Social Security- but it does need to be addressed, and that may well mean changing the way we think about college.
However, and unfortunately, Santorum's righteous crusade against TEH GAYZ on behalf of THE CHILDREN has likely delayed constructive national discussion on this sort of thing for a while.
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Topic: American Election Megathread - It's Over (Read 763761 times)