A cartoon that isn't funny

[Occulus]

43. I grew up in the 80s, kid. Listen to this because I'm only going to say it ONE time.

In the 1980s, before that addled evil fuckschmuck Reagan convinced too many of us that we didn't need a social safety net and that greed was good, a high school graduate could, even with loans, go to college, get an education, graduate, get a GOOD job, buy a house, and start raising a family. This was expected. Not that they would do it, mind you, but that they could.

My father had the sole income in my family, under $60K/yr. On that income, he put both me and my sister through elementary, middle, and high school WHILE my mother stayed home because, get this, she didn't need to work in order to support us. She didn't even have to supplement my father's (modest!) income. One income, at what my father was making as a MIDDLE MANAGER, was enough to put two kids through school (both of us graduating with honors, thank you very much), DOUBLE THE SIZE OF THE HOME ITSELF, and get us a start into college. Yes, we both had loans. The payments on these, even on a minimum wage, did not cripple our futures. All my classmates who went to college and got loans experienced the same thing.

In less than ten years following my entry into college, higher education became progressively more and more unaffordable. My mom is in her seventies now. She works only because she wants to, because the house was paid off well over ten years ago. No mortgage, and her house is paid for, free and clear, including the property upon which it sits. Neither I nor my sister- with four kids of her own, living in a trailer park- will ever see the level of security or financial independence our parents had. NOT because we're shiftless layabouts, NOT because we make bad decisions, but because there. Isn't. Enough. Money. Coming. In.

We will NEVER own homes. We can't afford it. We won't ever be able to, even if we work as hard as we can and get as many hours as possible (this assumes an after-graduation job NOT in our degree fields, which happens too often to be anything but a showstopper). Neither I nor my sister will EVER be able to go back to school. The loan payments and debt we would graduate with are simply too crippling; without an absolute placement guarantee following graduation, the math simply does not add up. Minimum-wage work cannot pay off a four year (or longer) college degree, and there is no place in the nation- not one city, village, or town- in which we can work our way through school and pay rent and bills, all at the same time. In fact, there is no city, village, or town in which any American can work a minimum wage job and afford a two-bedroom apartment of any size. Not. One Village. City. Or. Town.

And really, that isn't too goddamned much to ask for, now, is it? To be able to work through school, pay rent and the bills, etc.? Minimum wage work used to be able to do that much, at least. Oh yes, roommates. I'm almost fucking 40. *I* have a roommate, and I'm not even in school. Make that math work, jeanyuss.

THESE. THINGS. ARE. NOT. OUR. FAULT. We both, in our own lifetimes, remember when that situation was not only not the case, but an entire galaxy removed from what we and everyone we knew and grew up with experienced as "America". We remember, clearly and with anger and the white-hot fury of a thousand exploding stars, the fact that when we grew up, a single income could support a family of four, pay for a home, go on vacations, buy Christmas gifts (mountains of them), put the kids into school and still have enough left over for elderly old Ma to live well in her old age. And not a bit of that, not one bit, was on a government handout of any kind.

That isn't possible any more. Stop denying reality. We're fucked as a society, and we didn't do it to ourselves. It was done TO us by the greedy-assed motherfuckers on Wall Street and in the overpaid and vastly underworked administrative offices of our schools and colleges, the predatory nature of our student loan structure, and oh yes, FUCKING REPUBLICAN ASSHOLES who wanted this situation, profited from it, and blame us for the shards of hope littering the floor of our china shop due solely to that goddamned FUCKING golden bull on the sidewalk in New York City that romped its way through our store, shattering our dreams as it went.

Wake the fuck up. You're wrong six ways from Sunday, and refusing to admit it puts YOU at fault, too. My only consolation in all this is that, given the direction things are headed and thanks in large part to your toxic apathy and misdirected blame, as well as those of people just like you, you will suffer the bitter fruits of phantom free-marketeer self-sufficiency more than I will.

Maybe you'll learn a thing or two as you struggle. And you will struggle, more than you ought to have. The pisser of it all is, you're telling the very people who don't want you to face that that they're wrong, placing blame where it does not in any way belong, and outright refusing the potential this country has to offer you if you and those like you would just get up off your dead asses and HELP FUCKING FIX IT.