There is something of an emerging trend on social media lately of young people publicly despairing over life in modern America.
One recent viral video showed a young woman, fresh from college, brought to tears over her long work hours and soul-sucking commute; all for a job that scarcely paid the bills —and asking whether this is what life really is.
Like others of the sort, the video not only garnered significant attention but divided opinions amongst those of the older generations.
On the one hand, there was ridicule for these soft Zoomers and Millennials, unable to endure what their grittier predecessors did.
On the other, there was sympathy and understanding, even identification with similar challenges faced in their own lives.
But though young people have always struggled to some degree when first starting out in the world, being even something of a rite of passage in the journey of life, watching these videos also makes it hard not to feel a profound sense of shame and embarrassment about the state of the nation.
Not because of these young Americans, but because of the circumstances and conditions that are causing them such despair.
For each generation has a sacred duty to make life better for the next, and to bequeath to their children a nation better off than they found it.
At least that was how it used to be anyway. But the America of today is in many ways worse off than it was for those of generations past.
The baby-boomers especially inherited an America where it was commonplace, even assumed, that an average American with an average job could afford to comfortably support a family on only a single income and live in a decent house in a safe neighborhood.
All without a college degree, and all by the time they reached their 30s.
While to most Americans today this seems like sheer fantasy — as by the age of 30 they are lucky to even be out of their parents’ basements or live in an apartment without roommates.
And even basic entry level positions now require a college degree, as the blue-collar manufacturing jobs once providing high school graduates with a good middle-class life were shipped overseas, along with so many once great American industries.
Moreover, Zoomers and Millennials were told from birth that if they did not go to college, they would end up as failures.
And so, they spent years perfecting their college resumes, and became the most educated generations in history.
Only now are they discovering that their hallowed degrees do not live up to the billing.
Quite literally, considering the massive student debt that came along with them.
Debt the baby boomers themselves never faced but have nevertheless hung around their own children’s necks like a giant albatross.
Further, boomers allowed colleges and universities to become extravagant woke indoctrination factories that leave graduates unprepared for the real world just when competition for gainful employment in America has never been fiercer.
Indeed, today’s young Americans are not only competing with legions of their fellow citizens, but also hordes of hungry foreigners from around the world, willing and able to work for much lower wages.
And just as America’s blue-collar jobs were once exported to China, ever more white-collar ones are now being outsourced by U.S. corporations to India or replaced by artificial intelligence.
At the same time, those once good paying jobs that remain in America today barely even cover the basics anymore, like housing, food, and healthcare, all of which have become obscenely expensive.
Speaking of housing, instead of ensuring that young Americans and families have decent affordable homes to call their own, as in the past, giant corporations like Blackrock have now been allowed to gobble them all up.
And while the boomers grew up in an America possessed of a strong national community and social cohesion, by contrast, young Americans today feel increasingly adrift in a land that cares not a whit whether they sink or swim, and which has been riven by mass immigration and identity politics.
In short, baby boomers inherited from their own parents a prosperous, socially cohesive country that was affordable and filled with abundant opportunities for average American citizens and squandered it all for their own personal enrichment, and at the expense of the nation’s future.
Is it any wonder then that today’s young Americans feel so angry and demoralized, and so betrayed by their predecessors.
And as a result, are listening ever more to the siren calls of socialism and other such radical nonsense.
If Americans of all generations do not once again embrace a sense of shared responsibility for the future of the nation and its citizens, as they did in the past, then videos on social media may soon be the very least of our concerns.
Lee Steinhauer is a strategic policy and political consultant known for his book "The Art of The New Cold War: America vs China. What America Must Do to Win." Lee is a frequent guest on Fox, Fox Business, Newsmax, and a published policy and opinion writer for numerous media publications. Read Lee Steinhauer's Reports — More Here.
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