Generation Screwed: Deepening inequity not acceptable

IT seems a core human instinct — though not quite a core belief — that things can get better; we seem to always imagine that faraway reindeer have longer antlers.

This optimism is so ingrained, so much a part of our cultural formation that anyone who might even gently question the idea is dismissed as a cynic. 

Or, in an exercise of absolute political cynicism by former taoiseach Bertie Ahern, as a “naysayer”. 

We have embraced positivity when pragmatism informed by just a flavouring of positivity might be a more reliable roadmap.

Earlier this week the Oxford English Dictionary named “youthquake” its word of the year. 

The implausibility of that designation should not take away from the huge significance of the escalating developments behind the word.

It recognises that Generation Screwed face a future far, far grimmer — and unacceptable — than the lives lived by their home-owning parents and grandparents. 

The word recognises too that Generation Screwed has votes and it beginning to understand how to use them to try to change the dog-eat-dog world they have inherited from far more privileged generations.

The West’s ever-upward graph of material accumulation has fallen off the cliff. Expectations once normally realised by anyone prepared to work — a home, a secure job, decent education, healthcare and a modest pension — are now almost as unlikely as a Lotto win for far too many people. 

An American study found that today young people are burdened with 300% of the student debt their parents carried making them 21st-century indentured servants.

They are half as likely to own a home as young adults were four decades ago. One-in-five lives in poverty and a significant number will still be working when, if, they reach 75. Salaries are all but frozen but housing, health, and education costs soar just as the idea of job security has gone the way of the dinosaurs. 

Economists point out that as the US is getting richer, American workers, like so many others in the West, are caught in globalisation’s race to the bottom. 

A 27-year-old man’s earnings in 2013 were 31% below those of his peers in 1969.

The social contract underpinning the West’s stability is a busted flush. 

This regression to Victorian standards is reflected in London, where hospital consultants struggle to find a home within the recommended 10-mile radius of their work. 

Nurses and other groundfloor workers are lucky to find any home at all, confirming that neoconservatism has pushed us into an unsustainable, tinderbox place. 

Multi-national firms that might invest here have pointed out that the same processes of exclusion and denial are in play in Ireland.

Had Generation Screwed the opportunity to vote for Bernie Sanders would Trump be in the White House? Will Generation Screwed, believing that he couldn’t be worse than the Tories, send Jermy Corbyn to Downing St?

Ireland has exceptionally young political leaders. Many cabinet members have siblings in Generation Screwed but there seems no indication that the scale of this modern serfdom has been recognised. 

If they sit on their hands waiting for the inevitable youthquake it will finally signal the end of moderate, centrist politics. That would indeed be the end of optimism.