Time magazine=Millennials Are Lazy, Entitled Narcissists Who Still Live With Their Parents

[Skidmore]

193. Good for you. Many of us have walked that road but

telling our children and grandchildren that they cannot rise is not doing them a bit of good. I grew up dirt poor. We never owned a home. We didn't live in a house with indoor plumbing until I was 16. My mother rented until I was in my 30s and when everyone was grown and out of the house she had a little extra money to purchase a rattle-assed old mobile home. She was proud that she owned something. (Crap, I'm crying now). We never had an automobile and live a mile outside of town. How many school dances and social events do you think we attended as youngsters?

I graduated high school at age 17 and the day after graduation, I put on my one good dress and walked 7 miles, crossing the bridge on the Mississippi, and spent the day going up and down Main Street in Keokuk, IA, putting in applications for jobs that I had no idea how I would get to should I get one. Came home with blisters on my feet and ran to get to the phone first for weeks after that. Job offer came three days before I headed off to college on a scholarship I had received for the first year.

I bought my first car when I was 30--a freaking Pontiac Phoenix piece of crap junk heap. It got me to work to support my kids since I couldn't rely on their father (a man who kept his money off-shore at the time). Point is my siblings and I rose, not because we were looking to our parents but because we needed to tap something within ourselves and understand that there are limits to what we can ask of others, who also have responsibilities. We rose and without networks and doodads.

It wasn't any easier then to work your way up from nothing then than it is now. Cost of living was less but incomes were a lot less too. My first apartment was $125/mo, but I was only making $425/mo to meet all expenses including the needs of a baby. Didn't have health insurance because I couldn't afford it and the place I worked did not provide it. I took all the overtime I could get and squirreled that money away, tried to qualify for grants or scholarships at the time while working long hours and on little sleep. Did that sort of thing all the way through grad school with time out for some difficult living abroad with spouse who felt minimal responsibility. You don't give up and you teach by that example.

Yes, to me there is a whine right now of Me, Me, Me, and where I hear it is in the insistence that somehow the road of life was a guaranteed smooth ride for everyone, free of bumps and potholes. Rising wasn't any easier during my parents' generation, all of them having grown up in the deprivation of the Depression and world wars. What is missing now is the sense of WE, which I think the President has very much tried to tap. WE fell apart after the elections because lots of WE went home and started being Me again.

I have a bunch of other stuff I could say on the sellouts on both sides. Greedy right wing corporate types and those on the left who struck the deal with the devil and it didn't just start in 2008. That's when it was inherited. Check back to the Clinton years. I will never forgive that man for NAFTA and I have little fondness for Robert Reich, who used to daily peddle the claptrap that sending manufacturing jobs abroad would make everyone here a white collar worker. WE have need of all sorts of talents. WE need to rise.