ReGeneration Page #7

about having a springboard to your career.

You're going to have to dedicate yourself

to paying off those debts.

You can't make your own choices.

Like maybe you graduate law school and

you'd like to be a public interest lawyer,

you don't have that choice

if you have a big debt.

You have to go into

a corporate law firm.

And pretty soon,

it's values get internalized.

You may think you can hold them off

and "I'll do what I want to do",

but life doesn't work like that.

When I went to go pick a career,

I wanted to pick a career

that would pay me a lot of money.

It's as simple as that.

I wanted to be financially stable

the rest of my life.

So even if I had the goals and hopes

and dreams to be a civil servant,

I wouldn't because

it wouldn't pay me enough.

What that is, its actually

indentured servitude.

It's brilliant what capitalism has done.

It gets people into debt very young,

and then for the rest of their lives

they're paying off the debt that

they have gotten themselves into.

And so, in fact, the more debt you're in,

the less freedom you have.

What if you took a fraction

of the military budget

that we spend on these insane weapons

and what if you used that instead

of having student loans,

you had student grants?

At that point you have invested

in the future of young people.

You can leave university and you will have

freedom to do what you really want.

Your individual freedom actually

has been enhanced

by the fact that

you have taken public money

and you've invested it in this way.

When the second baby is born,

we will be spending

$16,640 a year on childcare.

And that's after tax money.

Well, you know Nicole

is having a C-section

so well be in the hospital

for the first four days.

After that Nicole is home

for the 6 weeks maternity leave,

we get these days.

Only six weeks?

Doctor says eight. We'll take six.

That's a wild deal, taking your

six-week-old baby to day care.

Very, very scary.

And yet, if we actually

look at the condition

of the bottom 80% of Americans,

studies have shown

that the bottom 80%

have either seen their wages

decline or stagnate.

So today it takes two wage

earners in a family

to make the same wage

that one wage earner did in the 1970s.

The average family is working

six and a half weeks more today

then they were in 1989,

and making the same amount of money.

So people are working harder

and yet you get these ideas which says

if you work hard you will succeed,

if you buy these commodities

you will be happy,

and there is a point at which

these ideas come into contradiction

with the reality of people's lives.

Our cable TV bill, our cable modem,

you know $150 dollars a month.

Cell phone bill, $120 dollars a month.

If we didn't have those things...

Do we need them?

No, I don't think we do.

But we want them

Of course consumerism makes people buy

things that they don't necessarily need,

but beyond that what are the other

economic factors that are driving it?

And that has to do with the fact

that if your wages go down

and you need things,

you need to buy food,

you need to buy health care, you're

going to do it with your credit card.

And that explains a large part

of the debt that Americans have today.

If everyone took that one chance

of going for their dream,

they might fail but at least they tried.

And the institutionalized education,

institutionalized jobs

are still going to be there.

They're institutions.

Senior year of college,

with career path this way

in front of me,

just getting a job and working

and paying off those student loans?

Or career path with

the band in front of me?

It took courage and as one person

and one example,

I can say nine years later,

that there is no job that would

compare with the happiness

and what I've gained from being

my own person for the last ten years,

surrounded by people that share

that same desire to not be owned,

or to not buy into some other

version of what a happy life is.

Okay, Is everyone in here ready?

I want to see the graphic

and hear the music in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1...

We watch and are influenced

by more TV than ever.

We're more globally connected,

we're more aware of the world around us.

Meanwhile our schools and the cost of

living has skyrocketed over inflation,

while starting salaries

have hardly changed.

We're a credit card generation,

mass consumers.

And because of it, homogeny

has made us a little less unique.

et we are told in the

self-esteem movement,

that we are special and can be

whatever we want to be.

Yet with little direction,

we find ourselves lost with in our

absolution of faith with the education,

parenting and media that

has helped shape who we are.

Yet today's issues

are not so clearly defined.

Civil rights and the struggle of class

still hangs over us like a dark cloud.

There is no draft,

instead we volunteer to fight.

ut with 18 to 29 year olds maintaining

the lowest registration and voting rate,

is it any wonder that

those elected into office put

18 to 29 year olds in harms way?

Meanwhile, we want to save our earth,

but we're so intrinsically connected

to some form of a screen,

we hardly have enough time to look up

and see what the earth is saying.

And with all the problems of the world,

what is left of the hearts and the minds

of today's generation

to deal with today's issues?

Will we even try?

Roll it and take it.

Claire, start your intro.

Good morning Eagan High School

and welcome to a very special

edition of Eagan AM,

I am Claire Freidman. Today we will be

departing from our normal format

to focus on the issue

of the War in Iraq.

We see so many images of war and after

a while we kind of just brush it off,

and we say, "Oh there's another bombing,

what can I do about it?"

In 1965, the population

on the United States

believed that the U.S. was out

to help the world.

And I mean they really believed it.

Deep down inside,

that's what people believed.

They believed that lawyers

were out for justice,

that doctors cared only about

the health of patients.

That companies were trying

to make people's lives better.

On and on and on. Nowadays,

the reality is nobody

believes any of it.

Deep down inside, everybody knows

the war was for oil.

Everybody knows the war was for power.

Everybody knows that

corporations seek profits

and will do anything to get them, and

don't give a damn about their employees,

and don't care about

the consumers either.

They just care about the bottom line.

Everybody knows this stuff.

So then why isn't everybody as aroused

as we were in the 60s?

I mentioned that I don't really care

much about what's going on,

outside of my reality,

but its not that we don't care

about the world at large,

its that we want to know where to begin.

It's got to relate to you.

if you can paint a picture for how

something, a world issue, Iraq,

or whatever is going on in the world

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