As for a student, you might wonder why is it that the average age for a first-time homeowner was 23 in the 1960s, yet it was 31 in 2018? Why has college tuition almost tripled from the 1980s while providing less chance for gainful and stable employment? Why is there such a lack of affordable housing everywhere? Why are medical expenses the primary cause of bankruptcies in America, a unique phenomenon in the entire world? Why did American billionaires drastically increase their wealth, as tens of thousands of small businesses are permanently shut down in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic? How did the uniquely American lifestyle come about?
As a student, no matter your background, your first task should be to explain these stockpiling inconsistencies. After all, students carry the responsibility to maintain civilization. If we can’t make sense of history, how are we to align our course of action toward a better future for everyone?
Obvious Explanations Lack Depth
It is no secret there is an atmosphere of instability in America, to say the least. A volatile tension we have not seen for many decades, if not centuries. Even the most politically disengaged students can no longer ignore the effect of politics on their lifestyle.
Students across the political spectrum are under the impression as if they have no representation in the government, no matter who gets elected. Even amidst the coronavirus pandemic, the elites seek to lower the lifestyle of everyone by cutting the wages of the low and middle class through endless migration.
It would be easy to dismiss all of these issues as politicians of both parties merely serving as oligarch puppets. This would certainly be correct, as we have learned from this study showing that most laws are directly copied from corporate lobbies. It would be ludicrous to think that a mere citizen, even millions of them combined, would hold more influence over politicians than a well-oiled lobbying machine. Things simply do not work as we were taught; they worked by our public school system.
However, this is only the beginning of the tale. A tale of how everything keeps getting worse and worse for an average student to have a prosperous and stable future. Furthermore, the corporate superstructure portrays the worsening as something superior, advanced, progressive. For instance, you must have heard of the gig economy, a prime example of how heightened anxiety over unstable income is portrayed as something that is hip, inevitable, and modern. It is one thing to avail yourself of services such as being able to buy essays online, but another for the writer to be able to form a family on that income alone.
The Beginning of the Decay
If there is one single book that comes as close to precisely explaining how we the American lifestyle keeps eroding, and why American college students have to struggle so much with student debt, it is the book by Christopher Caldwell, titled “The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties”. Receiving top reviews across the board and praised by intellectuals from all walks of life, The Age of Entitlement dissects every step we have followed to get to the current state of extreme polarization, violence, intolerance, wage stagnation, cancel culture, corporate abolishment of the 1st amendment, and assault on all people who are simply trying to create a family without having both partners working multiple jobs just to make ends meet.
The Age of Entitlement revolves around the central idea that the cultural revolution in the 1960s, one that birthed the Civil Rights Act (CRA-64), did not merely create new legislation but a parallel legal and constitutional system to the existing one. This new parallel constitution – CRA-64 – creates an environment in which a massive drain takes place on the core demographic that established America as the world knows it, the people of European descent.
As this massive drain takes place, right up to causing the 2008 financial crisis, it creates a highly toxic dependency in other demographic groups, worsening their socioeconomic status. After all, nobody can deny that black families have vastly eroded since the CRA-64, introducing instead a violent gang culture. If you are familiar with the great works of the American economist Thomas Sowell, you would not be surprised that other intellectuals have come to the same conclusion.
The Age of Entitlement not only exhaustively tracks down ever legal decision based on the CRA-64 parallel constitution, its branching implications, but ties it to the drastically shifting mediatic environment and massive corporate consolidation. Most importantly, the book gives students a clear mental map of how oligarchs used CRA-64 to overhaul how the entire nation is governed, erecting barriers at every turn to democratic change, and presenting these barriers as reform. If you desire to understand today’s world, why your lifestyle and future prospects will likely decline no matter which college course you finish, read The Age of Entitlement.
In conclusion, remember Amazon’s Whole Foods union-busting heat map? Amazon’s strategy is to increase workforce diversity in order to prevent unionization. Apparently, hard data shows that racial homogeneity and common language increase the chance of unionization. And without unionization, good luck seeking livable wages and a pleasant work environment!
Across the board, corporations seek to undermine workers’ rights to the point of rendering your hard-earned college diploma useless. Big Tech lobbies are already hard at work importing millions of Indian tech workers in the middle of surging unemployment. This all leads us to an inevitable conclusion.
It is no longer sufficient to be a passive student, absorbing classes and pretending everything is fine while corporate power actively seeks to undermine our way of life and rendering your college degree moot. The Age of Entitlement is a fine start to clear your head, but organizing politically should be every student’s goal.
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