by Dave Tomar
Working my nine-to-five felt like life in Alaska during those months when the sun is so briefly out that you could take a dump and miss it.
And once that was over, once I was home and fed, I would immerse myself in history’s greatest sources of misery.
Write a ten-page paper on AIDS in Africa; a six-pager on the Manson Family murders; a dozen pages on the connection between violent video games and chronic masturbation. Explain the wanton criminal behavior of the Bush administration; the brazen corruption of the Bulgarian government; the gross hysteria of the Salem witch trials. Whip up a quick reflection on the massive human suffering created in the impoverished former states of the collapsed Soviet Union; the psychological complexity of the Nuremberg Trials; the disturbing failure of EuroDisney to excite discerning Frenchmen.
Detail the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Herzegovina; the ecological destruction wrought by ExxonMobil; Wall Street’s dismantling of the American economy; the spiritual indiscretions of pedophile priests; the nearing extinction of the world’s seafood; the proliferation of obesity, juvenile diabetes, and McDonald’s; the connection between tooth decay and methamphetamines; and the dangers latent in our own drinking water.
Explain why Palestinians and Israelis hate each other; why Tutsi and Hutu hate each other; why the Chechens can’t stand the Russians; why the North Koreans don’t care for the South Koreans; why Ireland loathes England; why India despises Pakistan; why everybody seems to hate the Kurds; why the Nazis hate everybody; and why everybody loves Raymond.
I have to tell you, this is one hell of a way to spend your evenings. I was probably getting laid less during this period of time than during any other in my young adult life. Note: It is never productive to bring up the tragic plight of ethnic Albanians while attempting to pick up a girl at a bar. Even if she’s intrigued, this conversation won’t lead to sex.
It was a dark time in my life. I was adrift in a sea of bleak opportunities. I was alone. I had Ethan around. But he was alone too. Such is the nature of growing up, standing on the terrifying threshold of adulthood with a childlike sense that nothing has prepared you properly for this moment. Only your future failures will suffice to teach you a thing.
I spoke quite rarely to my parents after moving out, a state of affairs that I think resulted from our mutual embarrassment over what I appeared to be becoming. Perhaps it was too soon to call me a failure. But certainly, I was a disappointment. A handful of squandered talent, all the straight As that a third grader’s mother could want, all the ambition to learn, to know, to become more. Now I was just an angry jerk with a shitty job, just barely affording a crummy apartment.
I was born into a world of good fortune, like a lot of Americans my age. I was born into comfort, into sweeping promises of opportunity, into a host of assumptions about the successes that must surely be ahead. I hope never to take for granted the things that I have, and I recognize the infinitesimal odds, when one considers the distribution of global wealth, that I would be one of the relatively few people, compared to the whole world’s population, who as a child never had to worry about where a meal was coming from, whether I’d have clothes on my back, or whether there would be a roof over my head.
And school is a gift, at least when you’re getting it for free. Either way, that I should be in a position to access the resources, minds, and communities that accumulate around schools is tremendous. Not everybody gets to be in this position.
I know these things, and I consider myself blessed. Even on the way to a job that was chewing up little pieces of my brain and spitting them out like chicken fat, I had time to appreciate that my situation could have been far worse.
Ethan cracked before I did and quit the industrial cleaning supply company. He wallowed in partial employment, and I jealously detested him for it. The jolting squeal of public transportation now awaited me every morning.
During my ride out to the burbs, I would look out the window of the commuter train and into the guts of Philly: the old factories and warehouses lined with cracked and blackened windows like a thousand punched-out eyes and crowned by graffiti on the outside walls of the highest floors, inscribed by god knows what kind of brave scaffold-less souls; people hanging out on stoops in the early part of the day drinking 40s and throwing dice; boarded-up bodegas jutting grotesquely from barren sidewalks, flanked by grassless lots; basement storm windows gone so that crackheads could slither in and out as they pleased.
One-hundred-year-old homes, once inhabited by ambitious families with jobs in nearby textiles factories, collected no rent from the rats, roaches, and squatting junkies. Piles of rubble and endless stretches of charred remains told the city’s story of twelve-alarm fires and police-sanctioned plastic-explosive detonations. Row homes like the one I lived in as a child had no doors, only gaping black portals to inspire a sense of morbid wonderment. What kinds of scenes awaited the beam of a flashlight in such damp, unlit, paranoid, and foreboding places?
Of course, these damp, unlit, paranoid, and foreboding places were homes. People’s whole worlds were in these places. So believe me, I know that a lot of middle-class bitching and moaning can seem sort of empty. Real poverty exists somewhere close by no matter where you are, and it’s much worse than a bunch of post-adolescent psychic discontent.
The world’s smallest violinist would be playing for all the discontented college graduates right now, but instead he’s waiting tables at Denny’s to pay for his art institute loans.
Still, the fact that some people have it much worse than college graduates is hardly a compelling justification for ripping off tens of millions of our allegedly best and brightest.
Indeed, the most alarming reality of my situation, in retrospect, was not the psychic struggle at all. It was not the existential crisis, even if this was an imposing presence as well. It was a larger financial crisis, the early makings of an educational bubble that has now swelled to the point that many experts are forecasting an impending burst.
Not to exaggerate my own personal problems to the proportion of a national crisis. I’m just saying—my struggles were typical of a system that was beginning to rot.
Today, many journalists are making this claim on my behalf.
Even as I write these words, the fervor of the Occupy Wall Street movement has reached Philadelphia. In October 2011, hundreds of protesters carried signs to City Hall calling for the federal government to make accountable the bankers and corporate CEOs who swindled us to the brink of economic collapse in the Wall Street crash of 2008, only to be rewarded with billions in government-sponsored bailouts.
Bankruptcies, bailouts, and bonuses have inflamed millions of frightened Americans who make no claims to militancy. The protesters in the Occupy movement have come out to express their desperation. They are struggling to find jobs, pay student loans, and become homeowners. But only millionaires and billionaires are eligible for bailouts.
During fiscal year 2003, I was a twenty-six-thousandaire, with forty thousand dollars in debt. I’d have given up a Learjet or two for a bailout.
I’ve been eligible for an occasional deferment on my federal loan for financial hardship, though I still accrue interest each month. After taking that option roughly five times, I have succeeded—in ten years of paying a monthly check to some bank in Wisconsin—at reducing the sum total of my debt by about a thousand dollars.
I don’t mind saying that the very thought of it makes me want to find seventeen-year-old me, beat him senseless, throw him on a boat to anywhere more interesting than New Jersey (read: anywhere), and tell him to get a job there cleaning public toilets. Poor stupid seventeen-year-old me wouldn’t have believed it, though. He wanted college to be so much more than it would turn out to be, and he was pretty sure that from a socioeconomic standpoint, it’d be worth the money. Poor gullible bastard.
His college obligations follow me everywhere.
Student loans are the one debt that cannot be declared away. And according to an October 2
011 article in the Guardian, the Occupy Wall Street movement is fueled significantly by students with little earning power who are carrying the burden of this failing economy on their narrow shoulders. The movement describes itself as representing the 99 percent of the population that has been betrayed by its government, its corporations, and, oh yes, most especially its schools. And according to the Guardian, “student loans have been stripped of nearly all basic consumer protections that every other type of debt enjoys, including bankruptcy protections and statutes of limitations. So, while you can have your business, credit card, mortgage and even your gambling debts discharged or restructured in bankruptcy court, student loan debt is with you for life—and sometimes beyond.”1
An article in Mother Jones from the same week reports that what is so remarkable about this mass of outstanding debt is that most of it has been accrued in just the last four years. All the student loan debt that’s ever been created in the history of U.S. education amounts to roughly $1.5 trillion. As of late 2011, the amount of outstanding student loan debt was verging on $1 trillion. The Mother Jones piece says that at best estimate, there are roughly sixty million Americans with outstanding student loans.2 How many of these people will drag stagnant debts behind them into careers, homes, and families will depend largely on the ability of the American economy to reward their investment with opportunity.
The Occupy Wall Street movement vocalizes mounting evidence that for a great many Americans, the investment has not been and will not be rewarded thusly. The Washington Post observes that as protests have spread to Philly, to Houston, to Washington, to Boston, to Chicago, to Baltimore, to Los Angeles, to the downtown financial district or commercial center or university campus of every major city in the United States, an outrage that is neither radical nor countercultural nor liberal in nature has become impossible to deny. There is a sense, the Post surmises, that we have been told that if we follow the rules, work hard, and do the right things, if we go to school, study diligently, and get good grades, we will be rewarded with homes, jobs, and security.3
In exchange for their ethical malfeasance, their revolting avarice, and their irresistible influence, those who have conspired to perpetrate one of the greatest wealth transfers in history have been rewarded with bankruptcies, bailouts, and bonuses. Oh yes, and zero convictions.
According to the New York Times, the Wall Street executives of Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, AIG, Washington Mutual, and Goldman Sachs (to name just a few) who created the subprime mortgage crisis that precipitated the economic unraveling of 2008 have been either acquitted or preemptively spared scrutiny by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. As the Times reports, “The recent financial crisis has failed to produce any criminal cases against big-name bankers or other top corporate executives, unlike the financial scandals in the last decade, when there were signature prosecutions of chief executives like Bernard J. Ebbers of WorldCom and Jeffrey K. Skilling of Enron. And although the commission is said to have referred a handful of cases of potential wrongdoing to the Justice Department, it seems doubtful that these will lead to criminal charges.”4
I know guys who have spent at least one night in the can for public intoxication. A couple of slurred syllables and the apparent intent to urinate into a street-corner honor box get you a holding-cell slumber party, but the billions of dollars that used to gird our economy suddenly disappear, vanish into thin air, and nobody spends the night in jail. Nobody gets a fine. Nobody is accountable.
And what’s more, the bankers, CEOs, politicians, and lobby groups who created this momentous decline have been paid the highest rewards that our society can bestow: riches beyond our wildest imagination, immunity from the laws that govern us, shelters from the taxes that we must pay, protection from the terms of borrowing that we must endure, and lives bound to be longer due to access to better doctors, safer foods, softer pillows, and weird rich-person shit like oxygen bars and botulism parties.
According to a 2011 report by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, the chaotic looting of Wall Street contributed to the depletion of the median American household’s net worth by 23 percent in just the two years between 2007 and 2009.5
And yet, reports the website CNNMoney, with its profits down by nearly 75 percent from 2010 to 2011, Goldman Sachs allocated ten billion dollars in the first three quarters of 2011 to its bonus pool. Though down by 25 percent from 2010, this pool results from a one-year increase—from 43 percent to 44 percent—of total company revenue.
Citigroup experienced no profit gains from 2010 to 2011 but did report a 6 percent increase in overall employee compensation. And Bank of America, losing 22 percent in profits over that one-year span, raised its employee expenses by 7 percent, and this in the shadow of plans to cut thirty thousand jobs. According to CNNMoney, we have to stand here and suck it while the investment bankers who did this to us get anything from modest bonus cuts to raises.6
Well, if I’m a kid paying for business school and harboring dreams of a mahogany desk and a car that makes people question the size of my penis, this doesn’t seem like a half-bad way to go. Cheating on a few tests along the way strikes me as perfectly good practice.
And what is your reward, on the other hand, for following the rules?
Why, a tremendous job, of course, with all the health benefits and vacation days and large-breasted secretaries you could want.
But let’s pretend for a second that this isn’t guaranteed. Let’s pretend that we are today graduating more college students than ever before, that far too few well-paying jobs exist, and that even as these contradictory patterns continue to intensify, the cost of entry into the educational institutions making possible the tremendous opportunities mentioned above continues to rise precipitously. Let’s pretend that the first things that greet you on the other side of this ever more costly and risky investment are soul-sucking jobs, cans of tuna fish, and twenty-year repayment plans.
If all of this was true, you’d be a sucker to follow the rules. You’d be an all-day, everyday sucker. Not only that, but you’d be among millions of other suckers who work not because they are educated, but because they must pay for their education. And if all of this makes sense to us, then we aren’t really learning a thing.
In the midst of America’s economic collapse, a million and one sure things have backfired on us. A stalwart vertebra of our economy’s spinal column, the auto industry, is resting on a herniated disk. Once the only guarantee even in uncertain times, the real estate industry is double dipping for its second bottom-out in half a decade. And even now, after all of this has become unmistakably clear, a sucking silence envelops the shit-hill of student loan debt that we claw through every day with no real end in sight.
How my parents ever got to a place where they could pay off their loans, I’ll never understand. Neither will the millions of other Gen Xers and Gen Yers who scan Craigslist Jobs daily wondering what the hell all that money was for. Education—one of the surest ways to invest your money for the future, we’ve been conditioned to believe—is today a gamble with worse odds than a sports championship in Cleveland.
As CNN reported in June 2011, the rise in costs for college education has contrasted so dramatically with the negative shifts in our economy that the middle class is being gradually priced out of its public universities.
According to the report, college tuition costs have surged by roughly 130 percent over the past twenty years. In 1988, the average public university tuition, adjusted for inflation, was twenty-eight hundred dollars annually. By 2008, that figure was sixty-five hundred a year.7
The Economic Policy Institute reports that in 1988 the average hourly earning for a male college graduate was roughly $21.50. In 2010, it was $21.77. This denotes a 1.3 percent increase over twenty-two years. The average hourly earning for a female college graduate was roughly $17.75 in 1988 and $18.43 in 2010. This denotes a 3.8 percent increase over twenty-two years.8
Factor in a 130 percent r
ise in the cost of a college education (to say nothing about the failure to narrow the gender gap), and 1988 America is kicking our sorry twenty-first-century asses. It makes me yearn for the days when it was cool to sew a Def Leppard patch on your backpack.
Incidentally, it was no longer cool but still somewhat socially acceptable to sew a Def Leppard patch on your backpack in 1992, the last time the federal government approved a raise in the amount of financial aid that could be awarded to a college-bound student. The number is holding steady at twenty-three thousand dollars for a four-year degree.
That said, the New York Times reported in April 2011 that two-thirds of all bachelors were now graduating with debt, compared with slightly less than half of all students in 1993. Based on the increasing number of students graduating in debt, the rising cost of tuition, and the stagnant job economy, there is cause to believe that a significant portion of this generation’s students will still be paying for college even as they start saving to send their children there.
One result is an increasing trend toward acquiring two-year degrees and enrolling in community college. While these may be a better investment, they are creating a workforce with lesser skills. A CNNMoney report speculates that in an American economy where we are simultaneously struggling to create jobs and fill jobs, the continued erosion of American skill sets is intensifying this seeming contradiction.9
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the unemployment rate for twenty- to twenty-four-year-olds was roughly 15.2 percent as of late 2010. And this picture remains bleak even as young workers get older. The BLS goes on to say that for those age twenty-five and over with a high school diploma, unemployment was at 9.7 percent in September 2011; for those with “some college or associate degree,” 8.4 percent; for those with a bachelor’s degree or higher, 4.2 percent. While this demonstrates a long-observed trend connecting higher degrees of educational attainment to better employment prospects, there is considerable evidence that in addition to relying on historical patterns of fading pertinence, this claim hides many of the economic fallacies driving the education bubble to grander proportions.