THE CITY
Our elected officials have done the same thing, ultimately. We have financed government at a level beyond our willingness to pay for it and thus have racked up debt which grows prodigiously. The young realize that while entitlement after entitlement accrued to their el‐ ders, they will be expected to pay for those programs while suffering great pessimism over whether they will ever enjoy the fruits of them. Just as with corporations, the government officials and their constitu‐ ents (the management and labor, so to speak) have conspired to postpone costs into the future. The young are supposed to look hope‐ fully into the future. But how can they do so when it has been loaded with debt like some ill‐fated corporate spin‐off? One of the great difficulties of being a young person just out of col‐ lege like many of the Occupy protesters is that one’s personal future is very much in doubt. Right up until the end of college, the young person has been on an escalator that is going somewhere. Preschool to kindergarten to elementary school to middle school to high school and then to college. It is all easy to understand and the next steps are clear. But what to do at the end of the escalator? There are some pro‐ grams which seem to feed people right along into another series of escalators, such as teaching, nursing, medical school, maybe account‐ ing, but many others lead to a more open future with widely variable outcomes. What of the English major or the student of history who does not go into graduate study? What does an art major do? How about the dramatic pupil, the communication arts scholar? For these students, there is no continuing escalator. When I got out of college in 1992, I could not simply enter an acad‐ emy of government service and get an assignment. Interestingly, I tried to do something like that. I obtained a master’s degree in public administration with the sole goal of getting into the Presidential Management Internship which would feed me right into a govern‐ ment agency. Despite being at the top of my class, I did not get the appointment. The uncertainty of my future terrified me. I spent the next several years of my life trying to figure out what to do and where to go. I earned a law degree and a Ph.D. Only then did I find my own path. During those years of confusion and wilderness, how I envied those with sure paths. I raged at the way my own life circum‐ stances had left me without the kind of parental connections or other favorable breaks which could start me in a career. I am sure that many young people in the Occupy movement share those feelings. 106