Harder today than good old days

When I was a little kid, I listened reverently as my father told me often about the long distances he had to walk as a child to get to school.

As a young man, I went to his hometown and saw that dad's long trek was largely in his mind. It was far less than a mile, and it certainly was not uphill both ways.

To be fair, he may have etched it in his brain as a gigantic slog from when he was 7 or 8 and his legs were short. In any event, it wasn't the Mount Kilimanjaro he recalled.

I think of this disparity when I hear my fellow 60-somethings ranting about today's high unemployment rate all being the fault of the unemployed and grumbling that poor people are wasting their food stamps on junk food when they should be buying organic fruit or maybe a nice Chilean sea bass.

Do the math, folks. Unfortunately, junk food often is a lot cheaper than healthy food, especially in low-income neighborhoods that don't cater to the Groupon crowd.

And the allegedly self-made folks are always talking about their own heroic struggles.

"I pulled myself up by my own bootstraps," they invariably say.

Bootstraps? Hey, I may be a geezer, but I wouldn't know a bootstrap if I saw one.

But I do know people often romanticize their own successes and many of these same people would be lost if they were plunked down in today's workplace with the limited experience and credentials they had in those legendary good old days.

It's a lot harder to get ahead today than it used to be when the Baby Boomers first went to work.

A high school diploma -- even a GED -- was all you needed to get a good factory or office job with a promise of promotions, pay raises and benefits if you just showed up and did your work. Sure, your pay might be low, but cars and homes were within reach, and there usually was a pension at the end of your working life.

And if you had a college degree or a skill you could do much better.

Now, however, a college degree is the minimum you need, and that's just to get a low-level job where you might linger for years while the economy lurches along, far from the booms that powered the United States through the last half of the 1900s.

I recently heard a retired federal civil service worker moan that she couldn't afford to go to college after she graduated from high school in 1965.

No, but she did have a brand-new car.

And she had an intact family and a dad who worked for Civil Service and showed her how to get one of those jobs for life. To her credit, she worked hard and prospered, although her career might have been more lucrative and more satisfying if she had chosen college tuition over car payments.

If that woman were graduating from high school today, she wouldn't begin to qualify for the job she retired from several years ago, with a guaranteed pension and insurance premiums far cheaper than most people pay today.

My point is this: A lot of the people complaining today had a lot of breaks along the way, and life was a lot different then.

They were more likely to come from intact families, always a good indicator of success.

They didn't have to look over their shoulder at folks from India or China who will do their jobs for a fraction of the pay, or worry that corporate raiders may swoop in and dismantle their employer.

And they didn't have to fund the huge government entitlements that will keep the Boomers in relative comfort even as the next generation struggles to underwrite them, often while being unemployed or underemployed.

Memory Lane is nice, but it's not reality.

Mark O'Brien is a writer in Pensacola, his home since 1978. He also is the author of "Pensacola On My Mind" and "Sand In My Shoes."