Growing Young Again

“You can’t go home again” is the famous observation by novelist Thomas Wolfe, and that is the growing problem of the baby boom generation.  Raised in the quiet 50’s and roaring 60’s in an America different in major ways from today’s, they deplore what they see now but just lack the energy to work hard to make it better.  Instead, they tend to hunker down and hope for a kinder tomorrow that will bring back the yesterday they recall, not always accurately, as somehow better. In the process, they tend to see more deficits than investments, more aliens than energetic new Americans, more dangers than opportunities.  What emerges is, according to demographer William Frey of the Brookings Institution, a widening culture gap between the largest generation and the youngest.  And that endangers all our futures.  The 78 million baby boomers are increasingly negative and isolated from the young in their views, and while the youngest seek new opportunities and new visions, the largest generation has the votes to stop or delay them.  Baby boomers were born to parents educated because of the GI Bill, benefitted from Eisenhower’s major expansion of the transportation system, had the major financial load of aged parents in ill health removed by Medicare, got everything from Teflon to computers through publicly funded research programs and educated their own children with the student loan programs. Yet they see public programs now only as another addition to deficits.  Instead of growth, they seek austerity.

In 1822, we were expanding into new territory, creating new states, vigorously building new roads and canals; this, ten years after the British had captured Washington and attacked Baltimore and New Orleans.  While Lincoln was fighting a Civil War he was also beginning a transcontinental railroad.  Back then, bursting with energy, as a nation we were so young we didn’t know better.  Yet, over ten years after 911, we are, as retired Marine and author Peter Munson points out in the Washington Post, hunched-over psychologically  as a culture, still in mourning, awaiting an enemy’s next blow.  He contrasts that with the can-do attitudes of the young soldiers he fought alongside of  in Iraq and Afghanistan.  We have ceased being expanders and become only defenders. In the process, we are missing opportunities to seize the advantage in new technologies, fold a new generation of energetic young workers into a workforce strongly in need of them, make the transition to clean energy and act on the issues of global climate change.

The recession of the last few years was not just a financial crisis.  It was also a product of declining industries and technologies ripe for replacement,, enabling a major switch of the economy from old energy sources to new, old infrastructure to bridges and buildings suited to the 21^st century, old assembly lines to robotics.  Economists report that jobs and wages are shrinking today, but that is in the old economy. Potential for jobs and wages in the new economy is unbounded.  Such a new economy requires educated and skilled workers of all types, yet we want to cut student loan programs, fight against the Dream Act, and reduce major research programs to a minimum.  We have seen the waves of the future in nanotechnology, robotics and green energy, but we don’t feel we can afford them yet.

The most bothersome statistics I’ve seen lately are the Pew Center’s report that only 23 percent of baby boomers regard the growing immigrant population as a change for the better, and the report that the percentage of American young people with college-level education has dropped from 1^st in the world to 14^th.  The German economy has shown how highly educated workers and acceptance of immigrants into the labor force can create an economic boom.  The 2010 census revealed that our under-age-18 population would have declined had it not been for the entrance of 5.5 million Hispanic and Asian youth.  Economists tell us that, with declining birth rates, we face major labor shortages without immigrants. Yet, until we cease our defensive attitude as a nation, we will miss opportunities to enable a better future.

It comes to this.  We cannot rely only on self-funded education of wealthy elites to guarantee our success as a nation.  We need more, not less, immigrants and native-born minorities each year, and we need them to become educated.  They are young, willing and able to become positive additions to the American work force, as others from abroad have done for many generations.  We need to educate them, and they want education.  We need more Dream Act and Student Aid legislation that will enable us to develop not just immigrant but our already present minorities to become more skilled for the economy of the future.  The neurosurgeons of today descend from the starving immigrants of the past.  A national program for education of young people in need, immigrants and American-born alike, is a priority.  They are our future.