Children of the Grunge

Photo by ArtofCulturalEvolution, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

My oldest son recently voted for the first time. He’s 19. He was born when I was 30. At the age of about 11 or 12, he was determined to become an electrician. His mother and I were hoping that he’d mature from “undereducated male skilled tradesman” to “electrical engineering student” by the time he was 17 or 18, but, no, at the end we had to drag him across the finish line while he dug his heels into…well, into anything, because he was most certainly not going to college, university, vo-tech, or anything. “Dear God, at least get your high school diploma!” we shrieked. He did. Barely. By December of his 19^th year he was fully employed as an electrician, and, because he shows up, by the time he celebrated his 19^th birthday in April, he was also celebrating a second ten percent raise. I’m quite aware the post-covid employment market and the inflation rate has skewed salaries and the dollar value of labor, but I’m also pretty sure the skilled trades were in high demand before the pandemic. So, yeah, two raises in six months.

So I asked my firstborn, the child of a GenXer, which is America’s sullen middle child, who had our quick moment of frenzied indignation in the early 90s before we figured out it didn’t matter much anyhow, so, as a generation, we decided to either careen through various careers or off ourselves altogether (https://afsp.org/suicide-statistics/) …I asked my firstborn, “So, Tom, what do you think of Biden’s gift to the Millennials of ten or twenty thousand dollars of debt relief?” He’s a teenager, not a Twitter blue-check’s precocious five-year-old, so he shrugged and said, “Huh?” Then he went on to talk about voltage meters and power switching modules and other things beyond my ken.

Ah, there it is! Nevermind has betrothed itself, has begotten, and has reared up a son, at least in my Tom, a true American voter if there ever was one: “Huh?” Whatever. Never mind.

He is like Mary, rest assured, pondering these things and treasuring them in his heart, how he followed his passion, nurtured it, pursued it, and landed it, but he was stepped over in the Big Bribe. We talk about these things at the dinner table, not in terms of politics (God forbid!), but in terms of principles, in terms of practicalities, which are undergirded by philosophical ideologies, and, of course, religion, faith in God, that is, what constitutes love for neighbor, and where the lines are between love and destruction. You know, like, the biography of Kurt Cobain.

Of course, Tom is a child coming into legal majority, one unremarkable child of one guy who was born after Roe v. Wade who grew up to love every second of the grunge movement and its immediate antecedents. Tom is not at all representative, and as you, my dear regular reader, surely know, I am not at all representative. On the other hand, perhaps I should have asked him, “What do you make of all these people older than you and younger than I who are making obviously motivated arguments about that gigantic cash handout?” We might just see the first child of many children stepping out of the grunge, moving toward us, towing behind them three generations of debt and indebtedness, with unblinking eyes, intoning, “The fathers ate the sour grapes but ours are the teeth set on edge.” In that way, he might be representative. I don’t really know.

Like I said, Tom is voting now. He barely graduated high school, and he will never, and I mean never ever, attend a post-secondary educational institution. He took one look at university life and blanched in disgust. In contrast, Deb and I are both academics; we both hold advanced degrees. I teach at an accredited institution. We both read books, in full view, in the living room. He can see what we value, and he knows how we encouraged him and cajoled him and exhorted him toward engineering, at which he is obviously talented, but he did not ever desire it. Instead, he has tasted immediate success in self-discipline to get up at 5:00 AM, do what his boss says, learn on the job, and do whatever he needs to do to be marketable as a skilled tradesman (he’s also very obviously happy with his lifestyle). He votes.

Here I would like to make an assertion about college and motivated young people, and even about young men in particular, but I don’t have the numbers to build an assertion, so I will declare from intuition: are we sure college is necessary for financial prosperity and vocational happiness? I submit perhaps our motivated young people don’t know that they can be successful without college, so they go to college, mortgaging a chunk of their future for a degree, even if only the value of time expended, and then they succeed, in spite of, I say, in spite of those years frittered away on campus. They go on to succeed in careers where a degree is necessary only as a credential, not necessary for the vocation itself, and they succeed because they were motivated to succeed anyway. They have a character for success. They were going to succeed in any number of vocations with or without college.

I suppose even this is clearly motivated reasoning, and it remains to be seen how the college market holds up with respect to vocational demand. Naturally, Tom’s reasoning is probably also motivated, and he votes now.