They burst your pretty balloon

Back to the working week and the grind of all that this entails. I shouldn't complain and I really don't as close to 10% of all of us who want to work and seek to do so remain unemployed (and that's a fake number because it doesn't reflect the total number of people without a job, just those who haven't given up looking for one. Yet.).

I'm not doing political agit-prop, at least not today. I don't care which party is to bless or who is to blame. A pox on both their houses (of Representatives and the Senate) if that helps move us forward and to hell with all of them if it doesn't. I'm starting to wonder as we near th 4th of July if one revolution really was enough.

Remember how our folks told us 'to get a good job, get a good education,' so we did. And that's what we told our kids and watched as they borrowed boxcars of money for college degrees that have qualified them to do what, exactly? Fill out crossword puzzles in Esperanto while waiting for a callback on that dental technician job that 145 other folks applied for? Time to downsize those big dreams, sweet-cheeks. Money doesn't talk it swears and empty pockets say nothing.

Last week our newspapers were covered with photos of young people just starting out, leaving high schools and colleges to take on the big, bad world. It's a little slow right now, we're telling one another, what with summer and all, things will pick up by the fall. Unless they don't and then what and don't even start on the why, because all that will do is make you sad and your children mad. In six months, those same kids will be popping up on the police blotter page for all the stupid stuff that those who are in despair see no alternative but to do.

Maybe it's always been this way or maybe I just never noticed how much closer to hopeless we've been sailing for nearly a decade now. We're going faster and getting nowhere-burning through our lives and resources so quickly the debt each of us owes is crushing us before we were even born. And still, we get up and go running up the mountain to see what we can see and stay plugged into a game that's long since played out.
-bill kenny