Class of 2017, I do not envy you.
Or maybe I do, at least in some ways. Your future is unwritten. You may not believe it, but you've still got a lot to discover about yourself and the world around you.
If you get to my age you might look back on your 20s and 30s with nostalgia. I do, because I've suppressed the feelings of economic terror that came with graduation. I don't really remember how hard it was to have no money. Now it almost seems like an adventure.
When I was in law school, ATMs weren't much more sophisticated than a Magic 8-Ball. They weren't digital; they had a few key phrases printed that mechanically rotated into position behind a little window in response to your button-pushing. You could trick them into floating you a $40 loan over the weekend by writing yourself an $80 check and depositing it through the ATM after the bank closed on Friday night. So long as you had any money in your account, they'd let you withdraw up to half of the deposit instantly. Then all you had to do was to cover your worthless check by Wednesday or Thursday of the following week; in those days it usually took at least five business days for a check to clear. If you could do that, it was all good.
A friend of mine, let's call him Don, who went to law school at Tulane had an even more elaborate scam, a system that involved the U.S. mail and banks in three states. A couple of days before the first of every month he would write a hot check on his Nashville checking account and deposit it in his New Orleans account. He would send a hot check drawn on his Birmingham account to cover the Nashville hot check. And then a hot check from New Orleans to cover the Birmingham check.
Then, on or about the first of the month, he'd receive his monthly stipend, deposit it in his New Orleans account, and all three completely hot checks would clear. A mutual friend who was a classmate of Don's says he "once drew it up on the board after Banking Law class. It was a thing of beauty with arrows going every which way. It made such an impression on me that I used it to teach the boys in my marketing class about Article 4 of the Uniform Commercial Code and the clearinghouse function of the Federal Reserve System ... Don's float system would not work nowadays in the world of electronic banking and almost instantaneous clearing of items as soon as they hit the branches of the Fed. But it was fun while it lasted."
ATMs are smarter now too.
We had other advantages over you. Like a lot of members of my generation, I was able to get through school without racking up any real debt. Most of you can't say the same.
The average Class of 2016 graduate left school with $37,172 in student loan debt. There's no reason to suspect you guys are any better situated. And if you've got a liberal arts degree, it's kind of hard for me to argue that you haven't been ripped off.
But hey, things get better--or at least they did for my cohort. Most of us were able to find jobs and accomplish things we never thought we'd be able to do. I distinctly remember having conversations with friends in my 20s where we completely dismissed the idea that we'd ever achieve anything like the comfortable existence our parents enjoyed. At 25, buying a house seemed impossible; we figured we'd live out our lives in sorry apartments, driving beater cars and scraping quarters together to buy jug wine.
Now we look back on that and it seems kind of romantic. For me, it's all material--I was probably too careful as a young person, that there were some risks I resisted that I should have taken. I don't regret anything because I ended up a happy man, and going down any road not taken would have resulted in a different present reality (I wouldn't trade what I've got for what's behind Door No. 3) but how can you not be at least a little wistful about what might have been?
But we weren't that cool or pretty, and I can remember times when things got real in a hurry. We lost a few back in those days, to the usual plagues that thin our herd, disease and addiction and horrible accidents. A couple of my friends did really stupid things from which they never recovered. All of us made mistakes.
As will you. I really don't know what to tell you other than maybe make whatever grievous mistake you're going to make early enough that you'll have time to recover from it.
It likely will be harder for you to acquire the kind of life to which you might imagine yourself entitled than it was for us. It will be harder for you to do better than your parents, especially if you are more interested in the soft power of the human imagination than, say, the leveraging of borrowed capital. There is no longer any safe space in the economy in which a cautious person might hunker down for 40 years--honest work and civic obedience are no longer enough to secure a reasonable place in our world. Most of you will hustle from gig to gig, piecing together whatever livelihood you can, tithed in perpetuity to some faraway counting house.
That'll be the reality for most of you.
Unless, I guess, you change it.
How? That's your problem, one that my generation hasn't had the political will or vision to solve. Because a lot of us have got ours, a lot of us are more afraid of change than a continuation of the status quo. Maybe that's why things seem to have regressed lately. A lot of what you're seeing in our politics can be read as the last desperate attempt of the old order to rake back whatever power it can. But you're seeing the end of the hegemony of old white men in this country--there are too many black folks, too many brown folks, too many gay folks, too many women and too many of you for the present coalition to resist.
Tomorrow is coming. What it will look like is up to you.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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Editorial on 05/07/2017