wildernesse

4thGA, GodlessDave & MzNeko:

Thanks for your perspectives--it always helps to hear other peoples' views.

I think that what your explanations show me is that our view is the "right-thinking, progressive view" that will help everyone and improve the world. Well, of course, *we* think that about our views. It's the same thing that conservatives think about their views. Not understanding what made the conservatives unhappy with the right-thinking, progressive people running the country, means that Reagan and Bush figures will keep successfully popping up (what they do after they pop up is another story). Demonizing the other rarely helps solve a problem between "us" and "them".

So, those of you elder people should have had a chance to evaluate what went wrong in the past--you've already had two cycles of progress and stagnation (relative to you). What stalled the progress? Why were people unhappy with what you were offering and glad to switch horses? People just don't go stupid every 8 years.

--tibac

Chicken Girl

Moving to PD because of the political content.

Fjordaniv

A few years ago, I was hired as an adjunct instructor at a community college. I dutifully attended the orientation, where a speaker from the local business coalition informed us that the bulk of the jobs in the area didn't require an associate's degree, and that we should concentrate on cranking out students with 3 month certificates, because that's all the training most positions required. In a few years, when the jobs became obsolete, we could retrain them. He also pointed out that few of these positions paid more than $8 an hour.

The latest emphasis is on "emotional intellegence," which in business parlance translates into conformity. Intellectual prowess is now being dismissed as a poor indication of future business success. incidently, the phsychologists who developed the e.q. theory in the 1990s are quick to point out that the widely disseminated version is little more than a misinterpretation of the original concept.

In any case, the problems to which you allude reflect a growing and frightening trend toward commodifying higher education in the service of corporate interest.

Fred

Evangelion

You must be feeling right at home these days.

HaysooChreesto!

So much complaining about "The Man". Too bad.

I got kicked out of my house when I was 17. I had no job skills and hadn't even graduated high school. I guess my life was over. Suicide or fleeing to Cuba were my only options?
I found a job setting scaffold and feeding a plastering pump. While my friends were still in school and living with their parents I was working 10 hour back breaking days and sleeping on a torn up couch in a friends one bedroom apartment.
When some of my friends went off to college I was driving a beat up 1978 red Datsun B210 and struggling to buy my own tools so I could learn a trade (lathing) so that I could afford my own apartment.
In 1989 my brother and I started our own plastering business by the skin of our teeth. We did it by hustling and with no financial backing. Some creativity and a lot of hard work got it off the ground. We did okay for a while and made some good money at first, but inexperience combined with doing business with some very unethical people eventually put us under.
Before that happened I had made enough to buy a house, get married, and basically start the foundation of a decent life. But I lost it all; the house got foreclosed on, my truck got repossessed, and I owed the IRS over $40,000. I was 23.

I guess at this point I should've started screaming foul at someone but I didn't. I knew that I had myself to blame and I knew that I had to do something about it. So I joined the army. I was sick of the construction business and I decided that it was better late than never to go back to school.
My wife had always talked about becoming a nurse and she could get that training while I was in the army and then when I got out she would work while I went to school. The plan was set and for the first time in a long time I felt like I was on the right track.
While in basic training my wife left me for some fat rich guy she was working for. I came home during X-mas leave to find this out.

So there I was. In massive debt, divorced, and I would see my daughter only three times in the next two years.

When I got out of the army I used my college money to attend commercial diving school. I loved it. I had a 3.8 GPA and was looking forward to graduating and joining the local union. One day on the docks I fainted and was taken to the hospital. It turns out that I have a minor neurological problem that would forever prevent me from becoming a commercial diver.
During this time I was also working for $150.00 a week loading trucks and delivering building materials. It wasn't enough to keep me sheltered and pay child support so I joined the California Nationa Guard to make ends meet. In my three years in the 'Guard I never saw dime one-it all went to my ex-wife who was driving a $60,000 Lexus while I drove a 1976 El Camino that had "Heartbeat of America" painted on the side of it. But it was what it was.

So I kept working. I dedicated myself to my job. I eventually worked my way into a sales position and now I'm the sales manager for the company. I just got through buying a new house and I'm meeting the pool contractor later today.

So you or your friends can't get a summer job? Tough shit. Live a little son and make your own fucking way. Life is hard, it is very hard and just because there's not some government program that will make your life less difficult doesn't make you some helpless little toddler. The day that you figure out that some politician isn't ever going to do anything to improve your life is the day you have hope.
Hard times? Don't make me laugh.

Evangelion

:boohoo:

So you were lucky, Lamma. Congragulations. Not everybody is. Don't blame them for that.

Meanwhile, let's hear from Monty Python's "Four Yorkshiremen" sketch...

• Four well-dressed men sitting together at a vacation resort. "Farewell to Thee" being played in the background on Hawaiian guitar.
  
  Michael Palin: Ahh.. Very passable, this, very passable.
  
  Graham Chapman: Nothing like a good glass of Chateau de Chassilier wine, ay Gessiah?
  
  Terry Gilliam: You're right there Obediah.
  
  Eric Idle: Who'd a thought thirty years ago we'd all be sittin' here drinking Chateau de Chassilier wine?
  
  MP: Aye. In them days, we'd a' been glad to have the price of a cup o' tea.
  
  GC: A cup ' COLD tea.
  
  EI: Without milk or sugar.
  
  TG: OR tea!
  
  MP: In a filthy, cracked cup.
  
  EI: We never used to have a cup. We used to have to drink out of a rolled up newspaper.
  
  GC: The best WE could manage was to suck on a piece of damp cloth.
  
  TG: But you know, we were happy in those days, though we were poor.
  
  MP: Aye. BECAUSE we were poor. My old Dad used to say to me, "Money doesn't buy you happiness."
  
  EI: 'E was right. I was happier then and I had NOTHIN'. We used to live in this tiiiny old house, with greaaaaat big holes in the roof.
  
  GC: House? You were lucky to have a HOUSE! We used to live in one room, all hundred and twenty-six of us, no furniture. Half the floor was missing; we were all huddled together in one corner for fear of FALLING!
  
  TG: You were lucky to have a ROOM! *We* used to have to live in a corridor!
  
  MP: Ohhhh we used to DREAM of livin' in a corridor! Woulda' been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woken up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! House!? Hmph.
  
  EI: Well when I say "house" it was only a hole in the ground covered by a piece of tarpaulin, but it was a house to US.
  
  GC: We were evicted from *our* hole in the ground; we had to go and live in a lake!
  
  TG: You were lucky to have a LAKE! There were a hundred and sixty of us living in a small shoebox in the middle of the road.
  
  MP: Cardboard box?
  
  TG: Aye.
  
  MP: YOU were lucky. We lived for three months in a brown paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six o'clock in the morning, clean the bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down mill for fourteen hours a day week in-week out. When we got home, out Dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt!
  
  GC: Luxury! We used to have to get out of the lake at three o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of hot gravel, go to work at the mill every day for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would beat us around the head and neck with a broken bottle, IF we were lucky!
  
  TG: Well we had it tough. We used to have to get up out of the shoebox at twelve o'clock at night, and LICK the road clean with our tongues. We had half a handful of freezing cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at the mill for fourpence every six years, and when we got home, our Dad would slice us in two with a bread knife.
  
  - Pause -
  
  EI: *deep breath* Right...
  
  I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing "Hallelujah!!!"
  
  MP: But you try and tell the young people today that... and they won't believe ya'.
  
  ALL: Nope, nope..

Evangelion

No, you weren't to blame. You were the victim of circumstances at the time. Hell, you've already told us exactly that.

ImGod

Lamma, you brought back my memories of the good old days (1986) when I drove my parents old 1963 Chevy pickup/farm truck (complete with rages to keep water from coming in through the rust holes) and painted bathrooms at the local plant for $3.25 an hour (while they stayed in use by the 1000 employees). I got myself a whole 25 cent/hr raise the next summer painting equipment as a return employee.

I didn�t have it quite as rough as you did, but I remember spending all my money on rent and utilities the last month of school one year and having to try to figure out how I was going to eat for 4 weeks and buy gas for the car with the $5 in loose change on my dresser. I found a couple of weekend home construction temp jobs in addition to my normal gofer job and finals to help tide me over until my summer job of air tamping dirt around new sewer lines started. I was sailing high with $100 left in the bank when school ended.

Then there was summer internship where I stayed in the $90/month single room apartment (single room, not one bedroom) where the � to 1-inch roaches would wake me up at night when they crawled across me. I saved enough to pay for the LARGE roach motels (took several stores to find them) and to pay for college the next year by working as much overtime as they would let me. I was hooked on that high paying $10/hr work with overtime pay.

I�ve worked some seriously crappy jobs for minimum wage. But managed to make up for the shortfall in hourly wage by volume of hours and second jobs. Now, I have it soft. I�ve been trained by several companies in the art of management and negotiations and sell my soul to the highest bidder for beer money. The expensive beer, not the cheep stuff. But that could change, so I'm keeping my shovel skills up to date.

As for your other problems, you should have just married some rich, old sugar momma to take care of you. What�s love or pride when you�re hungry?

HaysooChreesto!

LOL! Believe you me, if I could've found a sugar momma I would have taken it. Actually at one time in the army I shacked up with this girl who was an accounting manager for a Basha's department store but it didn't work out. I was still recovering from my earlier debacles.

Hard times are what builds our character. It's not enough to just get up when you've been knocked down, you have to keep fighting and hustling. It's corny I know. But I have lived by my first plastering boss's words, "ya gotta do whatcha gotta do".

It never occured to me at any time that my countries political system was the reason for my difficulties. It never occurred to me to blame my dad for his actions. I didn't want his way so I had to figure out my own.

If a man wants a job bad enough, he will find one. It may not be the job of his dreams, but a hustler will make it through anything.
If I lost my job tomorrow and the country went into a depression I'd have a job in a week. If it was digging ditches or shining shoes it wouldn't matter. I wouldn't be there for long, only long enough to find something better, but I will always do what I have to do.
There should be a class in colleges for stuff like this.

ImGod

The best advice I got from my dad growing up wasn't necessarily intended to be advice, more him wanting some free labor.

I went home one weekend from college and was talking about not knowing what I was going to do when I graduated. My dad told me "Go clean the manure out of the barn, you might as well do something useful while you are thinking about it."

It made me realize I should keep myself busy with any type of work, even when I'm trying to figure out what I really want to do. Plus, nothing opens you up to more potential career options than shoveling shit for a day.