It’s hard for young people these days. Whether it’s harder than it was for young people of past generations is an unhelpful discussion; they live now, and comparisons do little to address the problems they face now. But when I saw that 25% of people aged 18 to 24 had seriously contemplated suicide in the past 30 days, I was shocked.
Sure, dumping COVID-19 atop a future where the promises made of a decent future was understandably depressing, but suicidal ideation is a huge step past “the blues” into mental illness. The reasons for this are no doubt complex, and there are a great many factors that produced this situation. This made me wonder why The Atlantic published lawyer cum social activist Jill Filipovic’s identification of what’s to blame for such a bleak outlook on life.
Millennials, born from 1980 to 1996, are the best-educated generation in American history, and the most indebted for it. They are the largest adult generation, at 22 percent of the U.S. population, and yet hold only 3 percent of the country’s wealth (when Boomers were young adults, they held 21 percent). From 2009 to 2016, Millennial homeownership rates actually fell by 18 percent. A 2015 Census report found that 20 percent of Millennials live in poverty.
It’s quite curious why Millennial home ownership rates are so low, given that most generational wealth was accumulated through home ownership. But then, it’s likely due to the pervasive “expert” opinions pushed at Millennials that home ownership is a bad investment, even though they get a durable asset that either holds or increases in value, plus they get to live there. Instead, they get to rent, which means they pay money out to live in a place until they walk away from it without a dime for having lived there.
So what’s to blame? Jill has a theory.
The list of answers to “How did Millennials get here?” is long, but one reason stands out: Millennials are the incarceration generation. From cradle through childhood to parenthood and near middle age, Millennial lives have been shaped and stymied by policing and prisons.
In the single decade from 1980 to 1990, thanks in no small part to the War on Drugs, the number of people in U.S. prisons more than doubled. It peaked in 2009, having exploded by 700 percent since 1972. Although incarceration rates are now declining, they are not going down nearly as quickly as they went up. Indeed, if the pace of decline continues, it will take close to a century for the number of people in prison to reach what it was in 1980. Even a more modest goal, such as halving the number of current prisoners, wouldn’t be achieved until nearly all Millennials are in their graves.
If this seems like a non-sequitur, that only because it is. What does the crack epidemic* of the ’80s and ’90s have to do with Millennials? And what does the percentage increase since 1972 mean anyway?
No living generation has made it through the incarceration explosion unscathed. In 2009, nearly one in five prisoners was a Baby Boomer. Millennial timing, however, was spectacularly bad. Born as imprisonment rates were on their meteoric rise, they grew up in a country that was locking up their parents, then were locked up themselves as the number of children behind bars hit a record high, and entered adulthood in an age of still-high incarceration rates and punishments that last long after a person steps out of the cage.
On the one hand, mass incarceration is a fact, and a fact that is not only worthy of note but worthy of serious reform for a great many reasons, one of which is the impact on children who lose a parent to prison. But mass incarceration doesn’t mean it touched every Millennial’s life. As serious a problem as mass incarceration is, it only touched 2.3% of children’s lives. This is hardly negligible, but it hardly explains the other 97.7% of Millennials.
Millennials were left with the scars that come when you’re small and a loved one is ripped from your household. Kids with an incarcerated parent—and the overwhelming majority of incarcerated parents are dads—suffer from higher rates of depression and aggression, and are more likely to act out than kids whose parents are free. They are more likely to grow up poor, more likely to go to jail, and more likely to experience other adverse childhood events, including exposure to substance abuse, family violence, a parent’s death, mental illness, and suicide.
While reading Filipovic’s inane effort to conflate the experience of tiny minority of Millennials with widespread generational mental illness, it became increasingly clear why so many young people are nihilists rather than fighters, why challenges seem impossible to surmount rather than opportunities to overcome.
They look up to activists like Filipovic as their “thought leaders,” who provides easily hated targets to blame for their misery, so no young person ever has to engage in any “soul searching” about what role they and their choices play in their shitty lives, but at the same time tell them there is nothing they can do but fail. Life is awful, worse than it’s ever been, and there is nothing they can do about it. There’s no reason to try, no reason to care, as they’re just going to fail and inevitably end in misery and suffering.
Either Filipovic is a dangerous fool or a brilliant strategist, using logical fallacies to make the point that one can either succumb to the trendy idiots and liar or reject their facially absurd defeatism and fight back. Is there a silver lining behind her dark cloud?
Incarceration is far from the only obstacle Millennials have confronted, and it’s not the one and only driver of Millennial despair. Millennials have also faced spiraling costs in education, health care, housing, and child care, even as real wages have stagnated, good job opportunities have constricted, and the social safety net has frayed. But undoubtedly, policing and imprisonment made an already-precarious generation less healthy, less able to remain gainfully employed, less stable, and more vulnerable in economic downturns.
But as much as Filipovic offers no hope to Millennials, she has a “bright” spot for Zoomers.
As Gen Z comes of age, incarceration rates are dropping, having declined 7 percent from 2009 to 2017. But the United States still locks up a higher proportion of its people than any other nation in the world. And we still rely on punitive measures that shadow people long after they’ve served their time, making incarceration not just a temporary loss of liberty, but a lifelong albatross. One way to help the most vulnerable Gen Zers do better than their Millennial predecessors? Look to the millions of young people protesting in the streets, and the millions more showing their support by critiquing America’s racist and deadly systems of policing and incarceration. Listen to what the kids are saying, and reform the system to put justice ahead of criminalization.
Of course, the 18 to 24-year-old cohort that seriously considered suicide in the past 30 days are these Gen Z young people, some of whom are protesting in the streets, some critiquing “America’s racist and deadly systems of policing.” Voices like Filipovic might not be the cure to destroying the grit and will of young people, but the cause. And it’s working, as they are so miserable they would rather wallow in misery, even die, than do what they can to enjoy life. And yet, these are the voices they rally around, to do her woke bidding at the cost of their lives.
*In the midst of the darkest days of the drug war, Bobby McFerrin produced a huge hit song that recognized tough times, and yet wasn’t ready to call it quits.
Ain’t got no place to lay your head
Somebody came and took your bed
Don’t worry, be happy
The landlord say your rent is late
He may have to litigate
Don’t worry, be happy
No comments:
Post a Comment