by flory
I don't normally look to Cheers and Jeers over at The Great Orange Satan for inspiration for a serious blog post, but a throwaway line in today's offering got me thinking:
Today's seven- and eight-year-olds have never known a time when we weren't shooting people and blowing stuff up overseas.
I would take that a large step further. Kids don't really develop much of a grasp of the larger world until they're school age. By that measure, today's middle schoolers have never known a world where their government wasn't blowing up brown people living in deserts. With no readily apparent explanation why.
What kind of country will the children of our imperial adventures want for themselves?
Baby Boomers grew up during the Vietnam era. It would be hard to argue that didn't have a pretty profound effect on us. Good and bad. How will The Wars on Brown People affect our kids; and in some cases, grandkids?
And there are a few additional cultural touchstones for today's middle schoolers:
Foreclosures: 15% of mortgages are in default or foreclosed. That's nearly one in five homes nationally. In some states (Nevada, Florida) it's one in four.
What kind of attitude towards homeownership does a kid take into adulthood when 1 in 4 of their friends loses their home to foreclosure? And what does that mean for the economy in twenty years when so much economic activity is directly attributable to the homeowning business?
The Great Recession: My parents were products of the Great Depression. And that had a lifelong impact on their mindset. They were savers par excellence. Hoarders, almost. They didn't spend money on 'wants', they spent it on 'needs'. They were recyclers before recycling was cool. They didn't believe in credit but they did believe in a big cushion of cash in the bank.
Today's middle schoolers have seen their familes live thru the same upheavals that my parents lived thru. Will it have the same effect on their financial decisions as adults? And what does that mean for the economy in 2030?