While I chafed under my tiny salary and the uselessness of a degree in English Literature, and tried to decide what else I might do, I was involved with a classmate to whom I was engaged. From high school on, I had dated, usually quite seriously, except for three of my years in college, and had always at the back of my mind that I really hoped to be married sooner rather than later. Of course, I would go on working because for a while, it would be a necessity. I assumed without articulating it, that I would not have to face the possibility of graduate school if I were to marry.
My granddaughter is unattached, and doesn’t even mention any names in passing. My oldest grandchild is twenty-six, the youngest seventeen, and she has just been accepted where she most wanted to go. Once she graduates, she is going to be responsible for herself like her friends and cousins without any (verbalized) notion of ever depending on anyone else for anything. The reality is that she will have to continue to live at home and depend on that home for a safety net for a time that might be longer rather than shorter.
GI Bill Advertising Campaign Poster. 2010. Poster. From Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America Website. The Center on Progress at Indiana University, Teaching With Primary Sources
The enormity of the problems for young people in a changing labor market whose lives will be dominated for decades by debts to the government for helping them to become productive citizens is a matter of universal concern. When I think that I got married within two years of graduation, worked until the first child was born, and thereafter only part time until all three were in their teens, and we were comfortable, I wish I could see something similar in store for this third generation.
My husband had no GI bill,(owing to a bleeding ulcer within fewer than 30 days of enlistment), completed a machinist’s apprenticeship working in a defense industry, gained his engineering degree at night school, and meanwhile took over from his older brothers the care of their mother and home. He had it hard. I had it easy. The point though is that an average young adult must be uncommonly lucky to be able to be out of the parents’ home and on his or her own nowadays, even once out of college. To make matters even harder, except for the already well off, real dollars of today have not only declined in value, they have not increased in numbers.
Leaders seem to be not only stubbornly resistant to compromise, they seem to be oblivious of long-term detriment to our country if its future is overridden by expanding profit motives. We need to find a way to make those in charge look around them and wake up.
©2014 Joan L. Cannon for SeniorWomen.com
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