“There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its

children.”

Nelson Mandela

If you’ve been watching the news (and depending on how you vote) you probably think

of my generation as either a) the laziest, most entitled group of deviants America has ever

produced – or b) a victimized collective of patriots and poets (all Democrats) who have

heroically signaled an economic sea-change that will define the coming age by leveling

the playing field between the rich and the poor. (huzzah!)

But these are just narratives – driven by political agendas.

The truth is – the protesters do not represent the 99% – because they only make

up about .0001% of my generation. This fact alone makes it mathematically impossible for

them to speak for 99% of Americans, much less for people my age.

I want to talk to you about my generation – but the real us – not the .0001%.

You see – the vast majority of my generation didn’t attend the protests (I don’t know a

single protester) – because most of us were either busy looking for work – or working.

How could we not be?

“Deprived of meaningful work, men and women lose their reason for existence; they go

stark, raving mad.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

In the last twenty years the cost of a college education has risen 900% – 650 points above

inflation.

College now costs more – a lot more – than what you paid for it. Students are now

graduating with an average debt of $24,000, which cannot be discharged under any

circumstances, even bankruptcy. Interest rates on student loans have also risen (some

reach as high as 17%) and are often unfixed, causing late payments to compound their

debt – and quickly.

Given the dearth of well paying jobs (especially for younger people) the degrees we were

told would ensure us sound employment have started to look a lot less like an asset and a

lot more like a binding contract of indentured servitude.

According to census analysis, the wealth gap between the young and old ”is now more

than double what it was in 2005 and nearly five times the 10-to-1 disparity of a quarter-

century ago, after adjusting for inflation.” In short, this gap is the widest in American

history.

When people refer to us as “that entitled generation” they fail to realize that the majority

of us aren’t out on Wall Street, blocking intersections and smoking drugs. Most of my

friends are busting their asses trying to make it, working whatever jobs they can find

just to survive – jobs that would have hired them without their costly degrees – jobs that

won’t even pay the interest on some of their loans.

But to truly understand my generation we have to go back in time to before the economic

crisis – back before we even went to college.

Q: What is bor ing and useless and given to ever yone?

A: Socialized educations

Not only boring – America’s schools are now actively retarding the cognitive

development of the young.

Consider – all throughout human history children have been taught… what? What is the

foundation of knowledge – please do answer!

The foundation of knowledge is a discerning and well-trained mind that is able to reason

(v) – to think, understand, and form judgments by a process of logic. (Notice the first

definition of reason is “to think.”)

Throughout all of history the study of human reason, of the “great thinkers” has been

taught in schools.

The goal was certainly a utilitarian one – our ancestors were compelled to rigorously

condition the minds of their young in the same way athletes physically condition their

bodies. By offering contrasting worldviews and posing the “big” questions for them to

rack their brains over, students were taught independent thinking habits – how to weigh

and assess ideas on their own through the process of reasoning.

The curricula didn’t just ask, “Is there a god?” It also asked, “How do we define good

and bad?” and, “What is right and what is wrong and how can we know the difference?”

This sort of education was the exact opposite of boring. By challenging the youngest

minds to stretch themselves in order to grasp complex concepts children experienced an

intellectually rewarding education that taught them to value knowledge and reason for

their inherent usefulness.

In the (still recent) past a fully awake mind was a valuable commodity to a community –

something to be fostered and cherished for it’s massive potential.

Today, the study of reason has been purposefully neglected. I say purposefully because,

well – how can it not be? Do you think we just “forgot” to include a subject in the

curricula that was absolutely essential to every great society that has preceded us?

In place of knowledge our schools now teach concepts. In place of philosophy we are

given a specific ideology. We are taught information that is not only useless – but it is

questionable whether much of it can be considered information at all. And worse still,

much of it is downright harmful.

As a result the word “educated” has begun to take on a brand new meaning – one with a

negative connotation. A full education is now a full indoctrination.

“He was one of the numerous and varied legion of dullards, of half animated abortions,

conceited, half educated actors, who attach themselves to whatever idea is most in

fashion only to vulgarize it and who caricature whatever cause they serve, however

sincerely.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The .0001% movement is overcrowded with the end results of socialized education.

Lacking the ability to independently reason toward truth, the protesters blamed the wrong

people for their frustrations. Their inarticulate cries – like a thousand children all shouting

at once for impossible, unreasonable things, screeching and scolding the country through

an unrelenting cacophony of complaints – were ultimately ineffective, because they were

unable to identify the real source of the problem (ie: not Wall St.).

“This movement needs a strong dose of Ritalin,” prescribes your local family doctor.

However, in spite of the failure of OWS, now is not the time to write off my generation;

rather, it is the reason for you to stay tuned for further developments.

You see, an interesting thing is happening to my generation. As a result of our extreme

disillusionment, we are discovering our need to reason things out for ourselves,

independent from the liberal and philosophic ideologies that have been presented in our

classrooms as “transcending discussion.”

And we no longer believe a damn thing we are told on TV.

It must be noted that my generation is unlike any other that has come before. In the past,

in countries like Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia (two other nations that gave socialized

educations to their children) the state propaganda did not have anyone, other than the

church, to contradict the lies being told to the public. But my generation was raised

during the genesis of the information age; thus we are more skilled, more knowledgeable,

and more in our element than our elders at finding reliable, true information on the

Internet.

You might say we’ve discovered the need, as well as the means to fight back.

So what you’r e saying is…

Yeah, we feel lied to. Yeah, we feel betrayed.

And yeah, that’s probably what the Occupy movement was really about. It was the

inarticulate groan of a generation denied it’s right to prosper – carried out in the form of

a tantrum by a child yet unable to express its frustration. And so we groaned – because

deep down we knew – we know – that something has gone drastically wrong with this

country.

In a socialized classroom students are compelled to learn facts that exist without context

– we are asked question after question – and we raised our hands to answer them all.

But now we have questions of our own to ask.

And some of them might be considered “dangerous”.

Questions like: “Just because something is considered normal, does that necessarily

make it good?” and, “Do we have the right to question the very same society that we are

expected to spend our lives in service of?”

“It’s a bittersweet symphony – that’s life. Trying to make ends meat – you’re a slave to

the money then you die.”

The Verve

The search for truth is experiencing a revival in my generation. We are tuning out,

looking in, and waking up to reality.

The damage that’s been done to us by our elders can’t be undone, but it is my hope (and

my hunch) that Occupy Wall Street was not the end – but just the beginning. It was the

early warning sign heralding the dangerous truth – that at last – some of us are becoming

awake.

And we are more than just .0001 %.