"Income Inequality: The Kids Are in Charge," part 3

In my two previous posts I claimed that income inequality is the result of a collapse in American educational achievement and that this collapse began in 1973, the year that my cohort took over the reigns of the institutions from our fathers. On our watch we institutionalized the values of kids.

It is commonly thought that Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) were the privileged generation, but it was my cohort, the kids who began school in 1950, give or take a year or two, who have literally had it all. Having it all started with our education, a very democratic one. Aside from a small minority representing the traditional American elite classes, we all went to the same kinds of schools and learned to read, write, compute, and sit still for several hours at a time, all without Ritalin. We developed lots of inner starch in the 1950s. That inner starch came in handy for us girls, most of whom got through high school able to put the desires of the organism on hold. In other words, we postponed our sexual desires. There were exceptions of course, on the fringes of the social order, and many of my own classmates got married within weeks of graduation.

We were rewarded for our competence. By the early 1960s, as we graduated from high school, the American economy had taken off, thanks to the labors of our parents in the 1950s. Not only were we the first generation in American history to take good dental and dermatological care for granted, we were also the first to reap the benefits of American prosperity. We went out to work; some of us went on to the universities and to even better jobs. We had lots of choices. The summer after I graduated, I decided to go to work in order to save money for college in the fall. I went to a bank in downtown Louisville, where I was hired on the spot, with no more evidence of my skills than my high school diploma.

The American economy required our skills. If the U.S. was to produce all the goods its citizens demanded –– and, increasingly, the rest of the world –– all hands were required on board. This economic explosion, however, also offered us unprecedented opportunities for fun. It was amazing how well you could live on in an American university town in 1968 and still have money left over for booze and drugs. And don’t forget the sexual revolution, another benefit of American industry: the Pill, followed quickly by other birth control devices. Overnight, we were able to let go of all those youthful inhibitions concerning sex. Some of my cohort went off the deep end, but for the most part we did not throw everything overboard. After all, we had been raised in the cautious 1950s. As we emerged from the Sixties, especially those of us  of us who had experienced the decade to the hilt –– the rock concerts, the peace marches, the chanting, the summer of love, the days of rage, all the grooving and hanging out, the sex (no AIDS back then!), the binges, the balling, the grunge, the dope and acid and psilocybin –– after getting that out of our system, we moved on to new pastures.

Most of us got down to work, some of us even married and, outwardly anyway, assumed the forms and conventions of middle-class life: had children, or at least one, bought a house, mowed our lawns, paid property taxes. “Will you still love me when I’m sixty-four,” indeed. Within a decade we would in many ways replicate the lives of our parents, if with a better standard of living. We would enter the professions –– become lawyers, doctors, professors, especially the women in our cohort —  have careers or, at the least, good jobs, and further diversify and empower the economy. We were not radicals, despite the peculiar vocabulary that developed in the Sixties. Why demolish a system that rewarded us so well and that promised, as far as we could see, even more rewards in the future?

And, yet, we lacked spine: we were unable to pass on the standards with which we had been raised and that had made us successful in the first place: hard work, discipline, patriotism in a common cause. This was on view in our response to the oil crisis that began in 1973.

In retrospect, the oil shock certainly marked the end of the good times. The opportunities my generation had taken for granted, including jobs that simply fell into your lap, were a thing of the past. The U.S. economy had not reached its vast economic potential without being the world’s largest importer of oil, and, after the first Arab oil embargo in the fall of 1973, the price of fuel went from $3 to $12 a barrel. In a replay of 1944, Americans in 1973 were forced to line up to fill their gas tanks, and there was talk of fuel-rationing. Indeed, by the early 1970s, the enormous financial burden of the Vietnam War might have been a sign that we were living beyond our means. Still, the biggest jolt came after the oil shock and lasted for several years. And just when the worse seemed to be over, the Iranian Revolution of 1979 exploded, disrupting the oil fields of Iran. The GDP dropped, and “stagflation” entered the vocabulary of ordinary Americans, along with the reality of recession and unemployment.

The energy crisis was more than an economic blow. Despite our own vast energy reserves, we had allowed ourselves to become dependent on oil imports. The result was that hostile dictators now held the U.S. hostage: “our neck is stretched over a fence, and OPEC holds the knife.” So said President Jimmy Carter in his “Crisis of Confidence” speech of July 1979, during which he spoke of sacrifice and encouraged the nation to unite in order to survive what he called a “fundamental threat” to our democracy. And, then, in November of that year came the takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, after which fifty-two Americans were literally held hostage, for 444 days, by followers of the Iranian Revolution. For the U.S., the energy crisis was indeed an admonition: “You must change your life,” indeed.

How did my generation react? In the way encouraged by the president? Did we face up to the reconfiguration of the world order and respond in the venerable and time-tested American method for achieving victory: hard work, discipline, and patriotism in a common cause?

To be continued.

Image credit: Gavyn Davies; Kathy Lien