An Uncertain Future, An Unknowable Fate
It's hard for the young to have hope when the powerful are determined to rob us of our future
I entered the United States workforce when I was sixteen years old in 2008 right before the federal minimum wage was raised to 7.25 an hour, where it still, seventeen years later, remains today. I was a fry cook for a regional burger chain. I would get grease all on me over my 4-6 hour shift and break out in horrible acne that I would then shamefully display to my classmates the next day. It sucked but I’m thankful for this experience because it showed me, for the first time,
the vast chasm that starts to open up between the upwardly mobile and the working poor. Language changes during this time period, the way you talk about your future depending on what people are doing with there lives.
Between your sophomore and senior years of high school, a great sorting begins. Some people are about to start orienting their lives toward college, and they speak about there futures differently than those who are essentially forced by the clutch of circumstance— poverty and a desperate need to earn money for their family— to immediately become wage slaves.
And in through this experience, you learn to be humble and thankful for what you were given, the body you were born into, the faculties you have. And you feel a strange mixture of shame and relief.
There was something that united all of us even then though. There was something strange and pervasive in the air during that period. In spite of it all, the people who were about to take out massive loans to go to college, and the people who would continue to clean grease traps until they would receive three dollar pay raises to become assistant managers, both groups of people, even then, had so little hope for the future.
We all knew, in one way or another, that the future held something darker.
What started out as such a euphoric year quickly turned sour when we realized that, instead of Obama penalizing anyone in the financial system that caused all the pain, unemployment, and misery that stemmed from the 2008 financial crisis, he would instead let them off scot-free.
Austerity would follow, wage stagnation would follow, and day by day the bright bulb of youthful optimism faded from iridescent to a mere glimmer. If our self expressed supposed champion didn’t believe in a better world, why should we? Movements like Occupy Wall Street were mocked and crushed under his regime. robber-barons like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk were venerated and all the while the young wondered, what exactly is our place in this coming world?