When I first moved to
Georgia, one of my colleagues at Kennesaw State University explained how her
ancestors acquired land in Cherokee county.
They won it in the lottery associated with the Trail of Tears. This story brought home to me how recently
Georgia had been on the frontier.
It was, in fact, not that
long ago that our ancestors were pioneers.
Whether they braved the hazards of the trek west or confronted the
dangers of taking a sailing ship across the Atlantic, they voluntarily accepted
the risks of dealing with the unknown.
Today we are infinitely more
prosperous than our forebears. We do not
dread Indian attacks or need to obtain work in sweatshops. We might occasionally have to put up with a
natural disaster, but we know that relief will be coming. There will surely be enough to eat and
drink—and it won’t be long before the electricity is restored.
Nonetheless, we too are
pioneers. We have also entered
unfamiliar territory. The world is
changing around us—and changing radically.
We are participants in a great middle class revolution. This is new!
No other peoples have ever had to deal with the challenges we are
experiencing.
Because we are in the midst
of it, we seldom realize that ours is the first predominately middle class
nation in all of history. Never before
have so many individuals been in the middle class. Never before have these middling level folks
exercised so much power.
The question is what to do
with this good fortune. We are no longer
farmers. Most of us are not even factory
workers. Instead of laboring with our
hands, we are more likely to work with our heads. Many more of us have thus become
professionalized or semi-professionalized.
We have been transformed into self-motivated experts in complex
activities.
Ours is a mass
techno-commercial society. We are
surrounded by millions of diverse strangers upon whom we depend for
survival. They feed us; they clothe us;
they build our homes. Were their
services erratic, we would be in serious jeopardy.
What is more, because the
tasks they perform are often technological, they must master complicated
skills. They must also acquire the
social aptitudes to cooperate with people very different from themselves. This requires that they be educated far
beyond what was demanded of their ancestors.
Today we must cope with the
uncertainties of selecting and preparing for an occupation. We will not simply do what our parents
did. We must instead choose from a
panoply of possibilities that we do not fully comprehend. What is available and what will we be good
at?
Today marriage and family
have also become optional. If we decide
to take a spouse, who will it be? And if
we make such a commitment, can we be sure it will not end in divorce? Isolated as we are in separate nuclear households,
it is up to us to make our intimate relationships work.
Today we must likewise
decide whether we will have children.
But if we have them, how will we raise them? Which techniques must we employ to prepare
them for a successful middle class adulthood?
The old practice of demanding that the young be seen and not heard is no
longer appropriate.
And how about politics? Once city hall seemed so far away that
fighting it was inconceivable. Today we
are so affluent and well-educated that more of us participate in
self-governance. But how are we to do
this? The split between conservatives
and liberals is evidence that we fiercely disagree.
Our grandparents might have
been wonderful people, but they are not adequate role models for what we
need. Like it or not, we must figure out
new ways to do many things. While we can
learn from the past, we must also innovate.
This ensures we will make mistakes that require flexibility to rectify.
Despite the sense of
entitlement that many young people feel, nothing about our future is
preordained. Unless we make suitable
choices, our good luck could run out. Unless
we are responsible, and intelligent, and hard-working, the progress we nowadays
expect could come to a screeching halt.
Melvyn L, Fein, Ph.D.
Professor of Sociology
Kennesaw State University
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