| As we've all heard and seen ad nauseam, President Obama campaigned on a message of massive hope. Times were bad, the economy was going from bad to worse, and we were hemmorhaging jobs. As a result our national mood soured to the point of divisive acrimony. Often used as a cautionary tale, Japan has also been mired in an economic slump, albeit one that has lasted almost twenty years, despite the continuation of their status as the third largest economy in the world. Conversely, China has been experiencing an economic boom and were able to survive the global economic meltdown better than the rest of the world. Optimism is high as illustrated by this CNN article about twins, who experienced vastly different career prospects when one moved to China. Jobs searches are limited to days or weeks rather than months or years.
What's going on here? Why are the United States and Japan experiencing a shortfall of dreams and the decline of the general aura of positive thinking? We have unparalleled freedoms here in the United States. Japan has been a frenzied whirlpool of innovation driven capitalism. We've basically been printing money for the two decades preceding 2010. It's probably not a coincidence that both economies have been historically fueled by the automotive industry and with that industry stagnating, so goes the rest of the economy. But it's got to go further than that. What else do we have in common? It could be argued that our countries have experienced a glut of time-wasters. By time-wasters, I mean the proliferation of nearly limitless media forms and incarnations. Our world has shrunk into electronic news scrolls that contain nearly our entire identities. We're able to see instantly how well people around us are doing, and therefore, perpetuate the perception that we, ourselves, are doing terribly. It would take an extreme event to convince ourselves that things are hunky dory. Major life mile-stones like marriage or births, a massive (not marginal) pay increase, web-stardom, or even the guarantee of job security with a safety net of some kind. We're surrounded by media outlets through which we can lose ourselves. Seven-story arcades in tokyo come to mind.
So what does that mean? What's killing our dreams? Why are we experiencing major losses in confidence in ourselves? I look at my decade younger 18 year old brother as representative of his generation. I love him to death, but currently his greatest aspiration in life is to secure possession of Call of Duty SEVEN and all the instruments that compose the monetized, mainstreamed and boiled-down-to-five-colored-buttons version of grunge garage bands. I'm very glad that he's contributing to the purchasing power of the United States but thus far for our generation, it's been ending there. The cycle that sustains that purchasing power is losing steam on the other end, invention, innovation, and the idea that anyone can start a business. It's not all bad news though, that last aspect has experienced a resurgence because more people than ever have had no other option but to go into business for themselves.
Ultimately, we need to proactively figure out how to jump-start that motivational combustion engine that creates new businesses, new jobs, new opportunities, and builds dreams anew without having to kill everyone's job prospects in the meantime. The first thing that comes to mind, based on the recent news that some in our over-hyped legislative bodies are working hard to cut public education funding by billions in order to cut deficits and save that generation from having to pay the previous generations' debts. With all due respect, are they stupid!? It's not going to help if nobody has the know-how or skills to work in the jobs that would provide the income-taxes to pay off that debt. Basically, they are saying, we have no faith in the next generation anyway, so let's deprive from them the tools to figure out their own problems while we attempt to figure out their problems for them. Protective parents are going to end up creating a generation totally unprepared for the real world. With all the tea party talk about stopping the government from meddling in our affairs, what do they think all these deficit cutting initiatives do?? The ideas of deficit-cutting initiatives (other than cutting down on war) and hands-off government are just not reconcilable. Nonetheless, whatever we do, we absolutely, utterly, unquestionably CANNOT cut public education funding. In fact, more funding should be poured into math, science, literature, and creative skills education. We need less political science majors and more engineers. Less sharks (financial, legal, or otherwise) and more philosophers. More innovators and less destroyers. The bottom line is, in my humble opinion, education is the key to everything. More jobs, happier citizens, and even world peace. Imagine if we sent teachers to Afghanistan or Africa instead of guns.
Your turn. How do we fuel the dreams of the next generation? How do we ensure that the generation after that will have the audacity to dream?
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