It’s not often I settle upon a world news item for the topic of a rant, but this little piece I saw on Yahoo News couldn’t be ignored, even if the story is out of Australia.
In the interest of full disclosure I want to point out that in my day-to-day job I work with a lot of young people, high school students on up to young “millennials” off wasting their parents’ money – or worse yet, mine – as college freshmen and sophomores. There’s nothing more cliché than a man in his 40s, or who is 40, beginning a resentful statement with: “These damn kids today…” but, these damn kids today are a breed apart from those damn kids of a generation ago.
Yes, getting kids to focus upon and care about whatever their job is can be just about impossible; that’s nothing new. I’ve had more than a few call-offs for “illness” that weirdly coincided with the midnight release of some highly-anticipated video game or another. I’ve had to assure kids that the “rinse” sink serves an actual purpose more times than I care to count. I’ve been continually amazed at how kids who I know live no more than five minutes away from the shop can’t get to it sooner than five minutes after the scheduled start of their shift. One gets used to these things as being the nature of the beast.
Yet, it seems to be getting worse. Once upon a time you could chide a kid for calling off because they wanted to stay up all night playing Call of Duty, and they’d take their ribbing knowing they deserved it; and would be grateful for not being fired. Today, the only thing public education seems to be teaching kids is to cultivate and nurture a massive sense of entitlement. And, in some sick way I suppose it’s reassuring to know that this twisted phenomenon isn’t unique to the United States.
“The Daily Telegraph interviewed two NEETS – Ashleigh and Amy of Mt Druitt who said they would prefer to spend their days ‘chilling at maccas’ than look for work. Ashleigh told the publication she had no plans to ever get a job. ‘I don’t want to work my whole life and just die… I want more than that,’ she reasoned while reportedly in the carpark of the local Centrelink,” reads a portion of a piece in today’s Daily Telegraph.
Go ahead, re-read that to confirm the utter disconnect between wanting and getting “more,” and having “no plans to ever get a job.” Oh, and “maccas” is Australian for the fast-food chain “McDonald’s;” they’ve figured out a way to cut the syllable count in half. A “NEET” is a person Not in Employment, Education or Training – in short, a Bernie Sanders supporter with an Aussie accent; think Crocodile Dundee without any of the self-starter machismo. A recent study indicated Australia has 580,000 NEETs out of a population of 23.78 million; so, about three New York Cities’ worth of people total, and more people than live in Albuquerque aren’t even trying to be part of the labor force. One in eight Australians between the ages of 15 and 29 are NEETs, according to the article. And, according to the two NEETs they interviewed, they seem to feel no shame over it.
“Amy, who said she has been unable to hold down a job, said she would call in sick to work when she was ‘over it’. ‘Then they’d just get rid of me,’ she said. ‘Not fair really because I just want to have a good time and chill but I don’t want to be fired,’”
Go ahead, re-read that to confirm her contention that being fired for calling off because she’d rather “have a good time and chill” is “unfair.” Then, you’ll begin to see the depth and breadth of the problem facing the USA. If not for an accident of birth, those two would have been faces-in-the-crowd at Bernie Sanders rallies.
In Australia, the numbers are grim. According to the article, of the 580,000 NEETs, a full 40 percent of them are “inactive and unwilling to work.” A smaller subset of NEETs, 19 percent, said they’d like a job, but aren’t actually looking for one. So, more than half of the country’s most useless young people are determined to remain as such. The young and the useless are an even larger burden for welfare states because they’re apt to live a long time, sponging off of others’ labor and never contributing a thing to the pot they eat out of daily. They will become an ever-larger, hungrier and heavier albatross about the neck of the Australian taxpayer.
And, the USA is staring down the barrel of this same gun. Emboldened, confirmed and rationalized by Bernie’s message, our own NEETs are legion, growing and gaining the same sense of entitlement as the two girls in the story. In fact, I’d dare say our useless, entitled children are worse than Australia’s. Again, a full 40 percent of theirs aren’t receiving any education and don’t want to work. Here, idiot politicians keep telling them college should be “free,” meaning the existence of the young and useless should be an even greater net loss to the working person than they already are.
But, that’s okay, because publicly-funded schools would be happy to jack up tuition for paying customers and then receive taxpayer money to teach kids useless shit like “women’s studies” and “art history.” In fact, enterprising colleges are rapidly adjusting their curriculum offerings to attract these young, useless morons wasting our money. Arizona State University, Marygrove College, and probably others, are already planning to help kids waste six years and six figures by offering Masters of Arts degrees in “Social Justice.”
“Social Justice,” is of course the largely social-media-spawned notion that “justice” varies depending upon one’s sex, race, sexual identity, sexual orientation and other largely superficial factors; thereby assigning people the roles of “victim” and “oppressor” based not upon any actions undertaken by the latter against the former, but by the latter’s combination of sex and race as compared to the former’s. A complicated algorithm then determines the extent and nature of the former’s victimhood based upon the latter’s privilege within the rape culture of the patriarchy. Naturally, it takes six years to learn all this butthurt verbatim.
And people ask me: “Kyle, why do you day dream all the time about homesteading a ton of land in the middle of BFE, while living off the grid, resisting all taxation and using a massive trebuchet to deter visitors?”
Well, they should be able to stop asking now.
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