Teen Talk: Teenhood Today: Recession unites us through joblessness

thedailystar.com

There is no situation that is quite as un-American as a recession.

Despite all parental despair over where their desensitized, degenerate children will lead the nation, despite all foreign biologists' campaigns to classify the Homo americanus as the nearest relative of the common sea sponge, the average Joe the American is a breed of high expectations.

Joe the American is not to be confused with Joe the Plumber, who is rumored to be camped out in Alaska with an unidentified mistress who enjoys long moose kills on the tundra and encouraging other people to believe that Obama only ran for president so that he could have the privilege of personally killing your grandmother.

No, Joe the American is a man/woman/undecided who knows what he/she/RuPaul wants. As far as he understands it, if he works hard in America and pays taxes, he is entitled to a steady income; if he spends four years drinking quite a lot of beer in a college dormitory, then he is entitled to an above-average income.

If he works for a company for more than five years, he is entitled to a 401(k) plan and employer health insurance. And by God, if he wants to write bizarre effigies about "West Side Story" ballads as an explanation as to why he'll try to fly an airplane into the White House dining room, he is consarn sure entitled to do so _ as long as the lyric extracts don't tread on copyright limits.

We have fun with obscure references to failed presidential assassins, but the root of the matter is that the American mentality expects results for effort. Ours is a nation where any child can grow up to become a doctor, an astronaut or any other force for good in this universe _ or, if the dark side appeals more to him, he can become a Republican politician.

American children thrive on a constant diet of being told that, so long as they get good grades and work hard, they can be anything they dream about. Except for Spiderman. Or a magical princess. Or any of the other professions that children actually dream about.

Unfortunately, the message of infinite opportunity fed to these starry-eyed scamps peters out abruptly when they graduate from high school or college. It is then that a small, hastily-scribbled footnote is stapled discretely onto the corners of their diplomas _ a footnote that reads "Disclaimer: Due to your failure to foresee the economic meteor-plummet that accompanied your graduating year, this piece of paper is worth slightly more in terms of employment prospects than the ink used to print it _ and much less than the printer cartridge. Those are really expensive. Someone should look into why that is. Well, you'll have plenty of free time now _ go Google it, young scholar."

If you are an American citizen who works hard, got good grades, has a clean background and a resume that glows so brightly with relevant experience that it could be used to guide ships into harbor in the dead of night, you are guaranteed absolutely nothing. And that is really what's so terrifying about the recession.

Americans are not used to being employamentally equal. Oh yes, there are some things that all Americans expect to have: the right to free speech and religion, for example, and having 15 percent of the money they earn never reach the ink of their paychecks. But in terms of employment, we have come to expect a particular ranking system. We expect that certain people _ those with college degrees who didn't major in artistic expression or literary comparison of cherished childhood fables _ should always be employed, usually in their fields of choice; certain others are expected to be usually employed, although typically in fields that are some variant of "customer service" (those who work in a Starbucks are called "baristas," which is the Italian word for "customer service"). Finally, a select few who have been carefully prepared through military shell shock and an infusion of alcohol into the veins twice a day (three times on the other two rankings' paycheck days) are destined to enthusiastically shake paper cups at people while sprawled in front of Dunkin' Donuts. In deference to the third ranking, every Dunkin' Donuts franchise is legally required to keep a homeless person no less than 20 feet from its front door at all times; conformity is the key to restaurant chain success.

We have come to view employment as the unspoken 11th Amendment of the Bill of Rights (yes, we are vaguely aware that there were more amendments after the original 10, but remembering those so that high schoolers can freely gaze into other high schoolers' souls through the windows of those high schoolers' extremely low-cut shirts during history class is what we pay historians for). Furthermore, generations of Americans have been nursed from the cradle with a sense of entitlement to a steady future. Unfortunately, the entitlement has vanished with the customers' ability to spend; the unemployed have no money, which causes companies to make more people unemployed, which causes companies to have less money and make more people unemployed. At the end of such a cycle, no one has a job or any money except the banks _ and the dragon vendors who sell the banks quality attack dragons to sit on top of the piles of money and ensure that no one gets within 50 feet of any money at all.

No matter their degrees or lack thereof, the majority of the American people are unemployable today. They are not unemployable because they cannot carry out tasks that various companies need; they are unemployable because no one is willing to spend any money to employ them.

Crisis is the great equalizer. Crisis brought together the American people as an affronted mob when the Twin Towers fell; crisis brought together the world in mourning when John Fitzgerald Kennedy was murdered on Nov. 22, 1963, in a city that did not love him. The recessionary crisis, however, has not united the American people by making them greater as a whole; instead it has united them by dragging those in the high risers to sit beside those in the sewers.

Unemployment has become the new bastion of equal rights _ it does not discriminate. Unemployment does not care that you double-majored in engineering and advanced ultra genius calculus while nursing sick puppies back to health; unemployment does not care how many spring breaks you skipped to take internships feeding orphans in Cambodia. Unemployment does not care about your resume or your diploma, because unemployment has a universal response to everyone: "Sorry, we're not hiring."

And that lack of discrimination just seems downright un-American.

Jessie Matus is a 2009 graduate of Oneonta High School.