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5 Ways We Ruined the Occupy Wall Street Generation
By: John Cheese November 10, 2011

At this moment, a whole lot of people, most of them 15 to 20 years younger than me, are protesting in every major city. What are they angry about? A lot of things, some of which are partially my fault.
See, I'm a part of Generation X, the post-Baby Boom era kids who grew up on a mental diet of Beavis and Butthead and Alice in Chains. We wrote poems about how angry we were at our fathers, wore goatees like weapons and made panties burst into flames by playing Pearl Jam's Black on our acoustic guitars. We were a bridge from the Baby Boomers to all you guys who are in high school and college now. And I'm pretty sure we ****ed up that handoff pretty badly.
This is not a sarcastic apology, I'm not a big enough dick to write all of this as a backhanded insult about how lazy and entitled you are. Because you're not. I'm honestly apologizing for ...

#5. Making You Ashamed to Take Manual Labor Jobs
During one "Occupy Wall Street" protest, somebody from the Chicago Board of Trade dumped McDonald's applications on the protesters. This made me think of a viral Facebook post that David Wong showed me the other day:
If you know who that came from, we'd love to give him/her credit for the post. And a high five or something.
Because yes, you guys are getting hammered for being too lazy or "entitled" to take on a low-paying job, and for standing up and demanding help paying for college, etc., instead of just being happy "flipping burgers." People my age and older will go on and on about how in our day we weren't too good to get our hands dirty when the good jobs dried up.
But I'm pretty sure we taught you the opposite of that. And the Baby Boomers taught us.
See, we were raised on 1980s movies and sitcoms, and the "cold, unfeeling grownup who works too hard" was the villain in half of them. The whole point of these "body switching" comedies -- where a kid winds up in the body of a grownup -- was that the career-driven workaholic dad learned what life was really all about. The message was clear: If you work too hard, you'll lose your soul.
The characters who worked their asses off were shown to be stiff prudes who come down on the lighthearted main character with an iron fist. Or maybe that person is the main character, but by the end they realize that the only way to truly enjoy life is to lighten up and embrace their inner child. They finally stand up and quit their grindstone job in a hail of applause, and live a life of stress free bliss.
By the time the Grunge Era came around, the "slacker" and "loser" characters were heroes, the guys who knew that life was really all about having fun. We were a self-depreciating group of people who proudly declared that we were what our parents always wanted to be: laid back and carefree. "Loser" and "slacker" were terms of endearment. We knew that the whole suit-and-tie job was a one way ticket to becoming Principal Vernon from The Breakfast Club. So many of us ended up slacking our way into fast food jobs. We were the guys from Clerks.
Flash forward a couple of decades, and most of us are now parents. We've since found out that there's not much market for making a really good honey bear bong or winning a contest for having the dirtiest flannel shirt (first place four years running, thank you very much). We've cut our hair, bought some decent work clothes and moved on -- lesson learned. But that fast food job stuck with us. It became a scare tactic to use on our own kids. We want them to have something better.
But here's the thing: Those Baby Boomers who started this "you don't want to flip burgers" bull**** did flip burgers. Or roof houses, or mine coal. And that wasn't something to be ashamed of back then -- that was the era before you needed a bachelor's degree to get a job waiting tables (but more on that in a moment). But at some point between my grandfather's time and now, getting your hands dirty became something to be ashamed of. My generation perpetuated that. We made it socially unacceptable to:
A) Do any job that requires sweat and/or a uniform. B) Work 70-hour weeks to get ahead.
So if you don't do either of those things, what's left? Getting an education and waiting for a good job in your field. But now, when we catch you doing that, we mock you and tell you to go flip burgers. And that's bull****. We told you your whole lives that those jobs were for idiots and failures. You think you're too good for those jobs because that's what we've been frickin’ telling you since birth.

#4. Implying That College Would Guarantee You a Good Job
Last month, I overheard a conversation between a steakhouse waiter and an older couple he was serving. He knew the couple, but not intimately. They politely asked how his classes were coming along, and he said that he had in fact graduated with a degree in architecture. For the next several minutes, the old couple awkwardly tried to reassure him that something would come along while he attempted to justify to them why he was serving steaks for a living.
It was painfully clear that he felt like a failure, and that he dreaded having this conversation with every older member of his family he encountered. Having to put a positive spin on his own life, trying to reassure them that he wasn't a failure, or lazy, or hadn't dropped out of society due to a drug problem. Yes, I did get my degree. No, they're not hiring. So, here's the thing. You have to go to college. Your parents told you that, I'm telling my kids that. Every high school teacher you have or had told you that. ("You don't want to wind up flipping burgers, do you?")
And they're not wrong; if I'm an employer looking at 200 applications to fill one job, and 50 of them have bachelor's degrees, those are going to be the ones I move to the top of the pile, even if the job is that poor bastard who shakes a sign outside of Little Caesars.
The problem is that we've sort of set you up to think that after high school, the next step is college, and after that you just jump in and start working at the job you went to college for. We kind of implied that this "college to job" transition is as natural and orderly as "high school to college." That is, if you get the right grades, you "graduate" to it. That's not true, and it's our fault that so many of you think that.
See, our parents told us that because they didn't actually know. As a generalized whole, they didn't go to college. You have to realize how recent the whole "everybody goes to college" thing really is. It was only two generations ago that college educations were rare -- in 1950, less than 10 percent of adults had bachelor's degrees (hell, only half even graduated high school). People back then were less mobile and more likely to stay in the town where they were born. That meant that their options were limited; men joined the military, or went to work at the local factory/warehouse/whatever was hiring. Women got busy having babies and being waitresses/secretaries/whatever was hiring. College was something that smart kids and people with money did. And they probably thought those college kids had a free ticket to a nice job in an air-conditioned office.
So when they worked hard and gave their kids the opportunity to get a degree, they thought they were giving us what those fancy smart kids got: an automatic job with a hotass secretary. Sexual harassment wasn't a thing yet.
Now everybody has a degree. It's the baseline minimum. So when you finally take those first steps out of university life and enter the work field, it's an absolute system shock to find out your $30,000 to $100,000+ bachelor's degree doesn't guarantee you a position in your field of study ... possibly ever. At least 40 percent of you who get degrees will wind up in jobs that don't require a degree at all. And the rest will wind up in jobs outside the field they studied.
Again, it's not that you shouldn't get a degree. Far from it. It's that the system we've declared to be the default also happens to be ****ed. You're not going to use 90 percent of what you learn.
I have dozens of examples of this in my inbox right now. People who have been where I've been -- poor and struggling, willing to do whatever it takes to get out of that soul-crushing hole. After years of it, they finally have enough and decide to go back to college. So I ask, "OK, that's a good idea -- then what?" And they don't know. They hadn't considered that even after graduation, they might be in exactly the same position as they are right now ... plus another $50,000 worth of debt. Nobody told them, or at least didn't tell them loud enough. So, yes, you're frustrated and angry about that. You have a right to be.