The Globe's Leah McLaren makes me irate sometimes.
Today is one of those times.
The gist of her article is that people currently in their late 20s and early 30s - the children of the baby boomers, known as the "echo" generation or mini-boom - were promised this fantastic, affluent lifestyle purely based on demographics, education rates, and the sheer hubris that comes from growing up with two career parents and no poverty. And guess what - the universe went back on its promise. Wah wah.
Not only does McLaren bewail her fate as an educated, employed, 30-year-old homeowner... she scorns the boomers, now in their 50s and 60s, for similarly bewailing the loss of their affluent lifestyles. Mutual funds have tanked, six- and seven-figure home values have tanked, and retirement plans are going out the window. But apparently this situation deserves no sympathy from twenty-somethings.
In fact, McLaren finds it helpful to blame her parents' generation for the mass financial chaos that surrounds us all.
"Who's crying the blues? Why it's the baby boomers, of course! The generation in charge - the one that created and perpetuated the unsustainable financial model that led to the current collapse in the first place," she writes. "And as for their jobs - you know the high-paying, secure ones at the very top of the pay scale? Well, they're going to have to hang onto those for a while longer than they had thought. At least until they get old and sick enough to max out the health-care system and the national pension fund. It's a wonder my generation isn't demonstrating in the streets."
Well, Leah, maybe it's because not everyone in their twenties feels quite as entitled as you do to owning a home by the age of 30. Perhaps you should take a hint from several of your interview subjects, who seem "relentlessly positive about the future" - or, as you put it, "close their eyes and plug their ears and hum Mary Had a Little Lamb till it's over." I'm not advocating unrealistic optimism. We are truly in the midst of an unprecedented global situation, and it would be foolish not to acknowledge that. But to bitterly declare "We have been robbed"? Comparing people who, as McLaren herself notes, have been privileged enough to buy expensive homes and find lucrative careers by their late 20s, to "hobos"??
What about the kids who never had a hope of belonging to a tennis club or riding a pony? Are we supposed to feel more sorry for people who had it all, and then lost it, than those who never had it in the first place and likely never will?
I don't want to sound unsympathetic to those who have hit hard times. Being in my early-slash-mid-twenties myself, I am no stranger to the crushing stress and anxiety that comes with thinking about the current job market. And being in the field of media like McLaren, as well as the non-profit sector, I do know what it's like to fear for your job, your rent payments, your livelihood. But like me, Leah McLaren still has a job - as a lifestyle columnist (which some misanthropes might say is the marshmallow fluff of the journalistic world) for one of the country's most well-respected and widely read newspapers, in an era when media jobs have taken massive hits and print media has been doomed to failure, not to mention the current wider economic gloom. I don't know what her personal finances are like right now, but her job status in and of itself should be causing her to thank her lucky stars.
And how does McLaren end her essay, after spending 1000 words or so pointing fingers at Mommy and Daddy for getting upset about their depressing financial statements?
With this mindblowingly self-centred epiphany:
"Which was when it hit me: Not only was I unlikely to get through this recession unscathed, I probably wasn't going to get an inheritance either."
Thanks for nothing, McLaren.
