I have long noted a generational demographic phenomenon that hardly ever gets written about, but seems to be more or less universal for people my age. If you were born in a big city area, anywhere from 1962-1975 you probably had it drilled into you from school, the news, and your parents that you could not expect to live past about thirty. The Americans or the Russians or the Chinese were going to blow up the world more or less without notice and no one was going to survive, and if you did, you would "envy the dead".
This was the standard cant that most of my contemporaries heard every day. It was the background assumption we all absorbed with the smog particles and our morning granola.
Kathy mentioned today that she never went to university.
I respond:
Hey! you didn't go to university either?
Well, I did a bit, but by the time I was 21, something happened in my wee brain: I woke up and thought, "Haaaaang on! I'm being had! and being made to pay through the nose!"
What a scam!
Kathy says:
I went to Sheridan College for a two-year Media Arts/Writing course (not journalism, but everything from radio ads to government reports). Very cheap and the best thing I could have done.
I had been told all through high school that Ronald Reagan was going to blow up the world anyway, so I was just looking for a way to waste some time. Besides that, I was the first person in my family to finish high school so I didn't have the example of other family members who'd gone to university, and I was intimidated by the whole scene, based entirely on watching The Paper Chase.
So for all those lame reasons I didn't go to university. And unlike all my friends who did, I have a well paying job I like, in my field, without their staggering tuition debt.
Aitchdubya:
That's interesting about the Blowing-up-the-world scenario. I have a lot of friends on the west coast who had the same experience. We all had it drilled into us so hard that the world was going to blow up in fifteen minutes that none of us ever took life very seriously. A whole bunch of us just never bothered to make plans because none of us expected to still be alive after thirty. I've encountered this again and again with the post-hippie generation kids. Their obsessions became the hard reality for their children. They were so irresponsible with childraising that it never seemed to occur to any of them what sort of effect their paranoid fantasies would have on the kids.
I broke out, finally, but I know a lot people who didn't.
I mostly didn't go, truth to tell, because I was on my own after fifteen. Just try to get enough stability and support to go to university as a ward of the state. It just turns out in retrospect to have been a good idea to stay away. I looked at the size of my first year student loan and the likelihood of getting gainfully employed with a degree in liberal arts and dropped it like a radioactive potato.
Best educational money I ever spent was $80 on a typing course at the Y. 100 words a minute! It was my mother who taught me to write.
What a wretched botch we've made of everything!
Kathy:
Exactly. The Berlin Wall fell down and we were all: Damn, now we have to get real jobs!! I know very few people my age (43) who thought they'd be alive past 30 either. Douglas Coupland writes well about this, well, Gen X phenomenon of course. It is a huge problem that few others have looked at.
And my mother was far from being a hippie, but she thought it was 'good for me' to watch the news every night because that's what she picked up from middle class people -- and look what I picked up from it! However, not going to university clearly saved you and me from stupidity.
2 comments:
I got nuclear apocalypse, environmental apocalypse, AND torture narratives at school. Stuff from Amnesty International about Latin American peasants being told by (American funded of course) soldiers that they needed to choose between sawing off their wife's arm and watching their son be kneecapped. Footage of Hiroshima survivors screaming while being bathed with full body burns. I was asked to read "Waiting for the Barbarians," a novel contaning graphic torture scenes and the resultant complete moral breakdown of the protaganist, as a senior in high school to evaluate it as a possible book for freshman English. AFter reading it I told the teacher it was completely inappropriate for 14yos and in fact had been completely inappropriate for ME. I can still remember her look of total bewilderment. She truly did not understand.
I have read quite a bit of very interesting literature by people who have survived communist imprisonment and torture. They were masters of psychological torture techniques to break down mental strength and barriers and induce childlike dependence on the captors. Orwell gave the classic description of course with Winston Smith in the end, loving B.B.
I can't help but feel that this was all part of the program. It certainly has made the generation that was brainwashed in this way docile, complacent and open to any suggestion made by the state-controled media.
In Canada, as you know, the government owns, controls, or screens everything that goes into people's heads either in school, print or broadcast media. The only salvation for anyone has been the internet. A bit of a mixed blessing.
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