Mess Up Kids
I have had links with the North East Kingdom of Vermont (near the Canadian border) since early childhood. Vermont taught me to value people as individuals (along with learning to speak with a Vermont accent 
. My parents met on a beautiful lake there where I spent long summers and then retired there, too, which kept my links to Vermont people. One of these was of great help to my mother after my father's death when she became blind and was one of the many who would drop in to make sure she was ok on a daily basis in the rented half of the house where my parents had been spending their winters. When the house owner wanted to sell, we bought it to keep my mother in place and then kept it on as a place which we have rented out to two families at a time. Such has made me aware of the terribly declining economy for rural people who used to thrive on family farms and the surrounding services for same. Now things are very grim, indeed. We keep the rents the same as they were 20 years ago, which allows two families to get by who decades ago would have been prosperous enough to buy a home of their own.
One of our nearby neighbors used to keep an eye on my mother and sadly has had grim things happen to her since -- her husband's early death and multiple sclerosis which has her now nearly entirely wheelchair bound. We chat frequently about things and the descriptions she gives of happenings there are frightening in their implications. Houses are being bought up and then rented out at high rates to prosperous people who go skiing or summer nearby as my parents did, whatever. The local people are ever more hard pressed to make a living. Jobs in Wal-Mart type places or Radio Shack cannot replace family farming, which is no longer economically viable. The town economy depends on a factory that could go belly up at any moment.
What really gets to one is that so many of the teens are apparently into drugs, dropping out of school at 16, getting into major trouble. In this town they vandalize whatever, e.g. smashed the car windows down an entire street one night last week. One has the sense of lives discontinued before they have even gotten started -- much as we in the city are aware of our teens in poverty circumstances dropping out of high school before graduating in percentages as high as 90% in some of our huge inner city ones.
One hates to imagine what sort of futures such kids will have. They cannot do much of anything without a high school degree in the way of employment. The factory jobs have gone to China. One has to do basic math even to be a checkout counter cashier. Trouble is what all this spells for America -- rural and urban -- so far as I can see. Riding the subways now I see many apparently unemployed African American men -- 51% in NYC at the age levels when one used to be starting a solid job career. The good thing is so many of them have young children with them, which suggests to me that at least their wives have gotten jobs that are supporting their families. But if we do not manage some serious break throughs in redistributing resources in this country and putting people everywhere to work, we are in big trouble. Europe has its problems, but it is a nearly century ahead of us now along these lines.
The one bright note in my life is that I have in my City University of NY classes the full range of students from everywhere who will be finding a place for themselves in our increasingly messed up system. I hope that some of them will work to make the U.S. a better place to live for all.
. My parents met on a beautiful lake there where I spent long summers and then retired there, too, which kept my links to Vermont people. One of these was of great help to my mother after my father's death when she became blind and was one of the many who would drop in to make sure she was ok on a daily basis in the rented half of the house where my parents had been spending their winters. When the house owner wanted to sell, we bought it to keep my mother in place and then kept it on as a place which we have rented out to two families at a time. Such has made me aware of the terribly declining economy for rural people who used to thrive on family farms and the surrounding services for same. Now things are very grim, indeed. We keep the rents the same as they were 20 years ago, which allows two families to get by who decades ago would have been prosperous enough to buy a home of their own.One of our nearby neighbors used to keep an eye on my mother and sadly has had grim things happen to her since -- her husband's early death and multiple sclerosis which has her now nearly entirely wheelchair bound. We chat frequently about things and the descriptions she gives of happenings there are frightening in their implications. Houses are being bought up and then rented out at high rates to prosperous people who go skiing or summer nearby as my parents did, whatever. The local people are ever more hard pressed to make a living. Jobs in Wal-Mart type places or Radio Shack cannot replace family farming, which is no longer economically viable. The town economy depends on a factory that could go belly up at any moment.
What really gets to one is that so many of the teens are apparently into drugs, dropping out of school at 16, getting into major trouble. In this town they vandalize whatever, e.g. smashed the car windows down an entire street one night last week. One has the sense of lives discontinued before they have even gotten started -- much as we in the city are aware of our teens in poverty circumstances dropping out of high school before graduating in percentages as high as 90% in some of our huge inner city ones.
One hates to imagine what sort of futures such kids will have. They cannot do much of anything without a high school degree in the way of employment. The factory jobs have gone to China. One has to do basic math even to be a checkout counter cashier. Trouble is what all this spells for America -- rural and urban -- so far as I can see. Riding the subways now I see many apparently unemployed African American men -- 51% in NYC at the age levels when one used to be starting a solid job career. The good thing is so many of them have young children with them, which suggests to me that at least their wives have gotten jobs that are supporting their families. But if we do not manage some serious break throughs in redistributing resources in this country and putting people everywhere to work, we are in big trouble. Europe has its problems, but it is a nearly century ahead of us now along these lines.
The one bright note in my life is that I have in my City University of NY classes the full range of students from everywhere who will be finding a place for themselves in our increasingly messed up system. I hope that some of them will work to make the U.S. a better place to live for all.
posted by Ed Kent at 3:47 PM
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