George Rebane
Last night after supper I spent several hours with a Nevada County high school teacher talking about the state of education here and across the country. He told of how top students, some of them brilliant, appear directionless with no focus or fire to go and do some definite thing with their lives. No desire to be the next whatever that would benefit society, or even make themselves wealthy.
The college bound seem to care only about getting good grades, and therefore take the softer subjects. Even their counselors understand that motivation and advise them to take this easier course vs that one so their GPA will be maximized. This motivation extends to students who demonstrate abilities to master STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) courses and enter productive STEM careers. Many (most?) who enter college as STEM majors quickly change direction into something like sociology, psychology, or English after their freshman encounter with a first real math class.
Talking to them about a future with family, house, kids, … makes no dent. The focus of the best of them is limited to getting into a better school and then looking around to discover how to graduate with the least work. Telling them about the prospects of finding a job or what different jobs pay also makes little impact. ‘$35K a year’s OK, I can live on that’ too often is their depth of planning ahead. The dismal numbers on local college graduates coming back to live with their parents is replicated across the country.
In The Quest – Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World, Pulitzer Prize winning author Daniel Yergin paints a penetrating picture of the economic and political history leading up to the Arab Spring. He describes the dire economic environments created and maintained by centrally controlled, corrupt governments that put up every imaginable impediment to commerce and enterprise. We know that the pressure cooker exploded with the self-immolation of a Tunisian merchant who was regularly and openly robbed by his city’s police. The rest is a saga that is still unfolding in places like Syria, Yemen, … .
The touchstones for igniting rebellion in each country have been the unemployed and unemployable youth. For example Yemen’s population consists of over 70% who are 29 and under; Egypt’s is 60%. And today in the United States our percentage of that demographic is 40%.
It is hard to conceive that we have over 120 million young people in America, the large fraction of whom are ignorant of almost every worthwhile body of knowledge known to man. They have been fed a steady pabulum of progressive propaganda since they hit kindergarten. And at least half of them, or about 60 million and growing, sit staring at a bleak landscape that appears to have no niche into which they fit or which will accept them.
In their ‘redundancy’ they will be joined by the laid off and not retrained/retrainable 50+ cohort. Together they will look at the socialist onslaught on capitalism and see nothing but the working haves across the economic divide. They will ignore the policies that gave rise to the massive public debt and unfunded liabilities that will have trashed what savings and pensions they have been able to accumulate. The progressive government will double down on its class warfare on ‘the rich’ and the ‘malevolent corporations’; it has no choice for survival save that historical alternative played by all collectivists in similar straits before them.
The fodder for the revolution has already been stuffed into the cannon – for the first shot they will be the misguided occupiers who will again serve as the next volley of the Obama Riots that started last year. And with ranks increased, they will be up to the task to overturn at whatever they can be pointed.
Will it all happen that way? I don’t know, but it’s a plausible scenario and therefore it can. And who will be there to resist them?
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