bob ellis ruminates about the good old days...

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2203915.htm#comments


The Young and the Restless

Bob Ellis
31/3/08

Binge-drinking, cocaine-snorting, ecstasy-popping at rave parties and casual oral sex in, I am told, "epidemic proportions" have lately drawn editorialists, archbishops, politicians and national broadcasters to decry the nocturnal habits of orgiastic youth, and tempted even the Prime Minister to thoughts of pasting scary pictures of road accidents on bottles of vintage wine.

But nobody has yet suggested, or even considered, let alone discovered why kids these days are behaving so badly and so recklessly after hours.

It's because, I believe, in their working hours their lives these days are deeply upsetting.

They have jobs that demean and shame them, jobs that offend their conscience and wound their pride, jobs out of which they have no clear hope in their lifetime of getting out of, into jobs that are any better.

Where once they might hope to get a university degree in Roman history or music composition or quantum physics and a job thereafter teaching it, they now find these things unavailable to them.

Where once they might have hoped to buy a tenement in Surry Hills or Fitzroy or Port Adelaide or Fremantle or Sandy Bay, they can no longer afford even to rent one.

When once they might have found it possible to marry and have children, they dare ponder that option no longer.

It was different, you'll be unsurprised to hear, in my day.

Back then you could buy a brick house with a big yard in a country town, as my parents did, for £3000 or $95,000 in today's currency. You could raise a family of five on a single wage. You could own a car and a motorboat and build over time a beachside shack as my father did, and spend your Christmas there fishing.

It was actually better back then, before bank deregulation, the property boom, economic rationalism, gearing, privatisation, the coming of ATMs, Paul Keating and Peter Costello.

And the jobs young people got in their teens were plentiful and most of them agreeable.

As a telegram boy you rode a Speedwell bike through country air with birthday greetings to a grateful old woman who gave you a cup of tea. As a girl in the telephone exchange among a gaggle of other girls exchanging gossip and listening in on adulterous conversations you made friends, as my mum did, for life. As a bus conductor you made new acquaintances, if you wished, every journey, and watched with fascination what people read, or wore, or whispered to each other. As an apprentice on the railways you made loyal friends and travelled through the night with sparks around your face acquainting yourself with your country, its landscape, its people. As a typist of essays and theses you got to know things you'd never have thought to look up yourself.

These jobs are all gone now, or going soon.

Electronic robot slaves have taken over the nicer, unconflicted jobs, and all that are left for humans to do are the nasty, humiliating, shaming, lousy jobs. Like bullying fearful debtors down the phone, six or seven an hour, in call centres. Like telling a retrenched and mortified auto worker he's going to lose his house. Like throwing vomitous drunks out of strip-clubs; or interfering as a cop on the beat in domestic disputes while children weep around your knees, or "exotic dancing", whoring, doing phone sex, giving relief in massage parlours or, as a company CEO, deciding which thousand humans you will sack to propitiate your thick-witted board of directors. Or, as a university vice-chancellor, which field of study you will eliminate from human experience to balance the books, and which dedicated professors and tutors you will offer frugal redundancy.

All the jobs that are left, thanks to emails, faxes, word-processors, mobile phones, privatisations, fast food and cineplexes, are those that involve human conflict: security, dentistry, the Family Court, "conflict resolution", protecting politicians from assassination, department stores from petty thieves, glassily smiling at hamburger customers, hearing out drunks in public bars or helping old men to their showers and toilets and feeding them their sedative medicines, or each night telling old addled women sleeping four to a room that they can’t go home again.

And so it is and so it goes, with bad jobs everywhere, jobs from which you might be sacked at any point, and rents going through the roof and frequent foreign travel no longer an affordable option, that young people, yes, take drugs and hit the piss and go down on one another as if there's no tomorrow. I would too in their shoes.

Who gave us the idea that a "fulfilling job" was no longer a necessary part of our civilisation, and that any job would do? John Howard, probably; or his sado-monetarist role model Baroness Thatcher. Whoever it was it's proved a foul and stupid idea over time.

It's increased alcoholism, divorce, petty crime, murder, sexual harassment, drug addiction, embezzlement, suicide in prison, knife attacks on police, pub brawls, violence against women, dreary conversation, fundamentalist religion and cosmetic surgery.

People with good jobs don't bother with these things because they've got a life; good jobs like, say, teaching Latin for $100,000 a year. Or instructing tourists on Arthur Streeton in the National Art Gallery. Or directing talented kids in a Shakespeare play at NIDA. Or judging Tropfest. Or playing the harp at WOMAD. Or growing an esteemed red wine. Jobs that very few people have now, or keep.

And what can be done about it?

Well, putting an eighteen-year-old conductor on every bus and tram wouldn't hurt. There's one on the Ettalong ferry and that small business hasn't gone broke yet. It would mean the bus gets there ten minutes earlier too, an idea whose time has possibly come.

Or banning the use of multiple-option recorded messages and hiring three switchboard girls for the office, the way we used to, which wouldn't send any corporation bankrupt and would please a lot of their customers. Or ordering Telstra, as a matter of urgent public safety, to give 20,000 telephone repairmen their jobs back, a public-spirited, life-saving measure that no rural customer would resent.

Or putting 5000 19-year-old traffic cops back on point duty in the crowded, beeping, road-raged big cities. And 3000 station assistants back on the trains. And 15,000 trainee librarians and kindergarten teachers into various country TAFEs. Opening 800 cafes on country railway stations.

These positions, when they existed, got young people into the habit of work, the expectation of career, the comradeship of the staff canteen, the pleasures of workplace friendship, the thrill of union action, the road to early marriage, the idea that life had possibilities, life in its sum was good. Now all they know of employment is human conflict, brutal, disloyal, awkward, unsettling, shaming, in-your-face humiliation from psychopathic sarmajor-types if they get a job at all.

Some kids fight back of course, and with vigorous optimism form rock bands, busk in malls, wash irritated motorists' windscreens at traffic lights, drive tourist buses through Asia to London, paint The Last Judgement on city footpaths, puppeteer at arts festivals, perform as clowns at children's parties, set up speed-dating websites, do stand-up.

But after a while they lose their dander, their joy, their chutzpah, their edge, and after a decade or so the drugs, and drug pushing, and drug dependence, or booze dependence, kick in.

Their longtime love-relationship ends in bitterness, self-loathing and thoughts of suicide and all they have left, if they're lucky, is a lousy job they swore they'd never end up in, and the booze, the drugs, the football, the beach, the alley, the morose midnight conviction they're wasting on trivial pursuits their one life on earth, the feeling they're not up to it, they're a dud, a loser, an also-ran, but possessed, thank God, of a credit card with which they can buy another round.

Binge drinkers? Sure, it's a problem. Rave parties? You bet it's a worry. Kids that swarm through a suburban house, smashing glasses, yelling, cursing and fouling the bedrooms? Absolutely. It has to be looked to.

But at the heart of it all is what we as a society tell our kids they must do in the days that precede the nights we object to. If we give them no life, no good, clear adequate life of work and self-esteem, they'll invent a fantasy one, with brain-mulching chemicals and coarse midnight rituals that border on the savage, the bestial, the infantile, the hoonish.

And if we the adults don't fix it for them, they won't. And neither will Hillsong or Scientology or the Salvation Army or the Taliban, however much their influence grows in the coming years in this country.

These kids are our future, they're whatever future we have as a civilisation, a culture, a way of being, a national song to be proud of. If they stuff up, there is no future.

We should look to this mighty, heart-tearing problem of good jobs and bad jobs pretty soon; very soon. Look at it with clear eyes.

Or maybe you disagree.