At the end of my first year in high school, I spent part of the summer of 1995 on the pastoral campus of Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. It marked my third straight year at the Center for Talented Youth (CTY), a pretentious name for a relatively simple operation: offering college-level enrichment classes to children who were bored by their regular education. CTY is run by Johns Hopkins University and is still going strong, offering kids from 2nd through 9th grade the opportunity to stay in college dormitories, study a particular subject intensively for two and a half weeks, order bad pizza, and bond with fellow nerds from around the country.
I took history courses all three summer sessions I spent at CTY and the focus of my final one was “Revolutions.” At the outset of the course, the two professors (both college instructors), had us participate in a game. They randomly chose three students and pulled them out of the class, consulting them on the game’s rules and general purpose. When they all returned, the rest of us were informed that we were to be ruled by these three, but that our goal was to obtain some measure of power through playing the game. It was up to the rulers what, if any, power we would be given from the beginning. Our goal was to each, individually, obtain an equal footing with our leaders.
The leaders announced that we would all start on a comparably low rung, but be offered the opportunity to curry favor with the triumvirate through a series of tasks or accomplishments. They offered trivia contests and card games, with important-sounding titles as prizes. After a few such competitions, we were stratified below the leadership, with the highest person failing to attain the rank of “king” and “queen” that our monarchs (two guys, one girl) had been given. Sensing mild dissatisfaction, the monarchs allowed the new nobility to compete for a “king for a day” role, which we remaining commoners observed with bated interest. We watched as the nobility competed fiercely, a winner was announced, and the monarchial crew sportingly consulted with their new peer on the terms for the next round of amusements.
After nearly an hour of rotating daily monarchs and fluctuations from pauperdom to nobility among the class, not one of the three original rulers had been displaced. The instructors eyed each other nervously. They began asking pointed questions of we, the ruled. “Do you think these games are fair?” they inquired. “Are you going to keep playing?” With the temporarily distracted air of swatting away a fly, we assented quickly and focused on the next task at hand that might marginally raise our condition.
Fifteen minutes later, the instructors again intervened. “We’re going to stop playing soon,” they warned. “Some of you have never even reached noble status once. Doesn’t that make you… angry? Shouldn’t you have the chance to make some decisions?”
I looked up, the prime target audience of this inquiry. “No one thinks this game is fair exactly, I don’t think,” I intoned, looking around for affirmation. “But what’s our alternative?”
Five minutes later, they whistled the play dead and opened a rather nonplussed debriefing on the activity. “The class is called ‘Revolutions,’” the younger instructor deadpanned. “We kind of thought you would start a revolution and overthrow the power structure.”
I couldn’t imagine how that would have worked or what it would have looked like. Each monarch had held a notecard symbolizing their authority. But this was a school, and one for gifted children no less! What were we supposed to do, rip it out of their hands? Rush their chairs and hold them down, three on one?
The youngest boy in the class spoke up for all of us. “I didn’t think of that,” he said. “I was having too much fun playing the game.”
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Is it a coincidence that my generation grew up to be the first in America to wholeheartedly embrace student debt?
Student loans certainly existed long before the earliest Millennials (born in 1980, I am widely considered part of the “Oregon Trail” micro-generation on the cusp between Xers and Millennials) came of age. My father, a Baby Boomer, had one that a collection agency tried to reclaim in the early ’90s, twenty years after he’d paid it in full. The initial loan amount was in the hundreds of dollars. By the time most of my peers were wrapping up graduate school, six-figure debts were becoming routine. According to Mark Kantrowitz of the website Private Student Loans Guru, Americans currently owe just shy of $1.5 trillion in student loans, an average north of $34,000 spread across 44 million borrowers. The annual federal budget is $4.4 trillion. Credit card debt, long deemed the heavy bane of capitalism, is just over $1 trillion even.
Most Millennials I know feel they didn’t make a conscious choice to initiate their student loans. Their parents lacked the money to pay full freight and the notion of declining the best offered opportunity of a college education was laughably self-defeating. We didn’t work that hard in high school, study that long for standardized tests, to fall short of our nearly attainable dream now. After all, the education would pay for itself in time, with high-paying jobs and high-flying achievements to come. I was in a select group of especially price-sensitive high schoolers who chose matriculation based on a scholarship, so debt avoidance wasn’t unheard-of. Then again, my parents were poorer than most of my peers’ (I’d attend CTY on scholarships, too), so my direct aid package was more generous.
“You’re not taking out a dollar more in loans than you have to,” my father warned ruefully, eyeing the required $1,000 federal loan that accompanied my full ride. “They’re a racket.”
My friends’ parents, lacking the experience of a year-long paperwork battle with an overeager collection agency on a long-dead loan, did not dispense such advice. “What’s the alternative?” a friend asked me when I boggled at his impending debt load. “Not going to college?”
Before the 2008 financial crisis, failure to attend a university was deemed tantamount to a death sentence. Parents vicariously living the American Dream through their children had hardly sacrificed everything for a better future only to be stopped by a little low-interest borrowing. Of course, parents frequently decided a suitable debt burden for their children, though they were not beholden to repay it. When those same children, often left out of the initial financial decision, faced graduate school as semi-autonomous adults, the second decision often felt abstract and arbitrary.
“I already have $60,000 in debt,” one college classmate explained. “Another $100,000 for law school seems reasonable, given how much lawyers make.”
Most of these lawyers-to-be espoused the radical politics native to my alma mater, Brandeis University outside Boston. One of the fabled “three B’s” (with Berkeley and Brown) in the ’60s, the school lovingly claims Abbie Hoffman as an alumnus, employed Robert Reich and Anita Hill. A revolutionary spirit was supposed to be part of the curriculum, imbued in our DNA regardless of expected tuition. But a funny thing happened on the way to 3L, of course. Public interest gave way to loan interest. The reality of $100, $200, or even $300,000 of outstanding credit came to roost. More and more classmates turned to large corporate law-firms to rescue them from their insurmountable mountains of owed money. Their community had changed, the Democratic Socialists meetings of Brandeis replaced with crim pro study groups who promised the diversion to Big Law would only take a few years, then they’d be back on the side of justice.
Some few of them became public defenders, I must note, or managed to land a low-paying public interest law job and beg for loan deferments. Many others grew disillusioned with law and left it entirely, dragging their six-figures behind them like a disgruntled elephant. Those who went to Big Law almost universally stayed in Big Law. The debt was so big and the lifestyle so lavish. If they paid off their debt, they made new excuses about the lifestyle to which they had become accustomed. Did you know how much kids could cost? They’ll have to pay for college someday!
But the underlying truth was this: They were having too much fun playing the game.
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The question I’m trying to unpack here is this: why haven’t Millennials rebelled? As a generation more likely than not to under-earn our parents, a generation who graduated into the dot-com bust and then the Great Recession, a generation for whom the American Dream is a historical artifact, we should be prone to take to the streets, mad as hell and unable to take it anymore. But quite the opposite is true. Sure, some of us go to Bernie Sanders rallies or retweet Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But even these acts carry a note of compliance, the idea that we can work within the system to undo it. In the era of Trump, who most Millennials revile, there is a startling commonality to our submission.
“The game is rigged,” Bernie tells us. And deep down, we know this to be the case. Rigged not only to compel our participation, but to inure us to the hopeless complicity we share in the planet’s destruction. We read about the number of species on the doorstep of extinction, the rising seawaters hungrily eyeing our shores, the extreme tornadoes and hurricanes battering the homes we can’t afford. And rather than demand change from the corporations and governments who fiddle while the planet burns, rather than refusing to feed the system that eats us, we play ball. We dutifully switch out our lightbulbs and take out our recycling, eat less meat and consider having fewer children. As though our collective action could overcome the rapacious appetite of corporate consumption.
The Baby Boomers’ anthem for their period of unrest was Bob Dylan’s “The Times They are a-Changin’,” in which a 23-year-old Dylan defiantly insisted “Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command. Your old road is rapidly agin’. Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand.” A would-be answer for Millennials was John Mayer’s “Waiting on the World to Change,” in which a 29-year-old Mayer justified our inaction: “Now we see everything that’s going wrong with the world and those who lead it. We just feel like we don’t have the means to rise above and beat it.” The irony that the same Baby Boomers who fomented such unrest now sit in the halls of power and wealth is not lost on us, though it is perplexing.
Mayer’s take on the game might best be summed up with his penultimate stanza: “It’s not that we don’t care, we just know that the fight ain’t fair.” In the meantime, we might as well keep playing and wait for our turn.
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How could those Baby Boomers go from fueling rebellion to maintaining order? My experience at a non-profit might provide some insight. The non-profit in question was San Francisco’s Glide Foundation, a loosely church-based institution that has long been the largest provider of social services to the poor and homeless in the long-impoverished Tenderloin neighborhood. Led by Rev. Cecil Williams’ brand of radical love in the 1960s, the “church without walls” broke barriers in accepting gay congregants, uniting a diverse population, and speaking truth to power while taking to the streets, feeding and clothing those in need.
In 2008, I worked with an intern from Germany on a project about the nature of Glide as an institution. It was a special project for the newly hired CEO, who wanted to study why Glide as an entity was so resistant to change and data despite being so effective at providing help for the poor and homeless of the city. The metaphor my co-worker came up with was a unicorn, which stood in for the mystical Glide culture that pervaded everyone’s image of Glide as a place in the community. Which is not to say that Glide isn’t a truly magical place, but that the image everyone had in their mind was more deeply magical than perhaps was real. And it came down to this unicorn that needed to be protected and sheltered, when it should actually be running free through the streets of the Tenderloin.
The issue is this: Glide became what it is (revolutionary, radically inclusive, a church without walls, a life-changing place) by taking risks, sometimes risking everything. This was easy to do at first because Glide was young and had nothing to lose. Glide was just an aging Methodist church in a decaying neighborhood when Cecil Williams arrived in the ’60s with a vision. He was able to put it into practice because he was totally unafraid of the consequences or risks. This kind of fearless abandon is the heart of the unicorn, it was what was so downright inspiring about the early years of Glide, and it is what spawned such radical and amazing change.
But here’s the problem. The more success that this methodology encountered, the more success there was to build on within Glide as an institution. Over time, Glide was no longer just the fringe radical group that welcomed gays and fed everyone. It acquired powerful friends like Maya Angelou and the Clintons and Warren Buffett. It acquired donors by the thousands, volunteers by greater thousands. It secured government contracts, grants, and a certain institutional entrenchment. This meant Glide suddenly had things to lose and thus to protect. No longer could Glide risk everything so freely. Now there was influence and ability to lose, with thousands of San Franciscans relying on the services Glide provided, made possible in large part by these key connections and assets.
This success, this accumulation of power and influence and assets, makes institutions more conservative. And what the intern and I identified is that there is a tipping point where the component parts of the institution (staff and leadership) believe there is more to be potentially lost from the future than gained. At or around that tipping point is when an institution goes from being idealistic and radical to protectionist and conservative. And the grand irony at Glide is that what everyone most wanted to protect was the mythical unicorn of Glide culture, whose every aspect was non-conformity, radicalism, inclusivity, and risk-taking. In other words, what everyone wanted to hunker down and preserve was the exact opposite of the attitude of hunkering down and preserving. And thus we presented our findings to an all-manager meeting and started to implement a plan where Glide could both preserve its radicalism but become fluid and idealistic as it had always been and everyone always wanted.
It is complete cliché that the young are idealistic radicals and the old are cynical conservatives, but this gets mistaken for the shorthand that age creates conservatism. The older conservatives would argue this is because experience teaches one that conservatism is correct, but I think the flaw in this reasoning is obvious from my time at Glide. It’s not age itself that sustains this pattern, but rather the process of accumulating things that one fears losing. This is why the rich are more conservative than the poor: because they have more to lose. The entire spectrum of idealism can be measured by whether one sees more fear or hope in the years to come. And that, in turn, is based almost entirely on what one feels one stands to lose.
And yet, this reality transcends individual experience. There are lessons here for institutions, nations, and perhaps humanity as a whole. Have we, as a people, crossed the rubicon from hoping for the future to fearing it? Are we content to clutch our cards close, to huddle with our ballooning debt and fluctuating retirement account, hoping that the sky won’t fall further so we can maintain our position? Most everything we seem to value and extoll speaks to radical risk-taking, the revolutionary spirit, and glorious hope. But these virtues risk expelling us from the table to which we cling, hoping merely to keep our seat.
Put another way, are we too afraid to lose our place in the game?
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The game does more than keep us playing, though. It compels our collusion with its very worst elements. This all started with a seemingly innocent discovery that has spiraled out of control.
In 1980, the year I was born, a lawyer named Ted Benna examined a newly rewritten section of the tax code and decided he could use it to set up tax-deferred benefits plans for retirement funds to be invested in the stock market. The section of tax code he highlighted was 401(k). Nearly four decades later, 54 million Americans have a combined $5.3 trillion tied up in 401(k)s. This shift of long-term savings to the market from interest-bearing bank accounts set the precedent that more traditional pensions and retirement funds could follow suit. So large was this shift that during the financial crisis, the potential collapse of stocks portended a resultant demise of pension funds nationwide. This nightmare scenario implied that saving Wall Street with the bailouts would also be saving Main Street’s hope for retirement.
Near the conclusion of his September 24, 2008 remarks on this controversial bailout, George W. Bush justified cutting a check to those who had caused the crisis: “The purpose of the steps I’ve outlined tonight is to safeguard the financial security of American workers and families and small businesses.” The interests of the rich and the risk-takers had become everyone’s interest.
In 1980, the interest rate set by the Federal Reserve fluctuated between 8.5% and a whopping 20%. The rate would never dip below 5% until 1991, then remain at or near 5% from 1994-2001. During the 2008 financial crisis, the rate was dropped to functionally 0%, where it stayed for seven solid years before an incremental rise to 0.25-0.5% in December 2015. The students I teach in college today have never seen a savings account offer more than a nominal interest rate. Meanwhile, the Dow Jones Industrial Average quadrupled from its 2009 low (6,443.27 points) to its 2019 high (29,551.42 points). Put $100 into a savings account in 2009 and you’d be lucky to have $102 now. Put it in the Dow and you’d have $458.
There’s no doubt that this shift of cash to the stock market makes good financial sense for any individual, institution, company, or state trying to maximize their return. The adage I was raised with – fiercely reinforced by the Depression-surviving grandparents who urged me to save their birthday and Christmas gifts rather than spend them – was to put everything away for a rainy day. The stock market was gambling, but a bank account was the promise of a future. By 2019, we’ve flipped that script, relegating savings accounts to the laughable terrain of the hopelessly outdated.
But in so doing, we’ve also tied our future to that of the risky investor, the corporate mogul, the corner-cutter, the polluter. To Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, to the heads of Exxon Mobil and Philip Morris, to whoever the next Martin Shkreli and Bernie Madoff may be. To the proverbial monarchs of our current little simulation. For us to accumulate not only sufficient wealth to pay off our student loans, but possibly stop working someday, these men and their ilk must continue to prosper. They will enjoy their immense wealth each day, but we must wait till we reach somewhere between 59½ and 67 to begin living off the small pittance of their victories we’ve managed to salvage.
This, of course, is the deeper meaning of Too Big to Fail. All these financial institutions are so hopelessly cross-invested that one titan’s downfall will crash the whole system. But beyond that, we are so hopelessly invested in the matrix of stock market gambling to see our interests outside of it. No matter the cost of big business to our social standing and fabric, we must pay it gladly when the alternative is losing our entire future.
Plus, it can be fun to follow the stock market, to set up a watchlist, to cheer its surges and bemoan its unexpected crashes. But do we really enjoy playing this game?
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And thus, we are caught in between. To be born in America is to know one has been blessed with disproportionate influence and power, to have the opportunity to manifest more change than most of the planet’s people dare to dream. Yet clinging to that promise requires active participation in a system that has insulated itself from the instinct to rebel against it. We will never acquire the money and influence necessary to pose feasible alternatives unless we play the game. And by the time we’ve won, we’re so invested in the game that it’s too late to change.
Perhaps the best advice we’ve ever received as a generation came from the 1983 film War Games, which most Millennials watched years later on VHS or syndicated television: “The only winning move is not to play.”
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I lingered after class that first day at CTY, telling my new friends I’d catch up to them at dinner. Waited sheepishly for my instructors to file out of the room, shuffling papers unnecessarily as I fiddled with my backpack. I counted three beats after the door closed behind them.
Two of the green monarch cards had been carelessly abandoned on the desks of their respective owners. The third required some light fishing through the trash. I’d abstractly envisioned these as props in some grand joke or gesture that night or in the weeks to come. But as soon as they were united, I felt vaguely uncomfortable with my surreptitious collection. My face flushed in the empty room. Had I missed the whole point of the exercise?
There was no power left in these cards. There never had been. All the power had been freely given.
Walking back, slowly, across the darkening quad, I tore the cards into little strips, dispensing a few sequentially into each trash can along the path. A gust of wind caught a couple of them and I watched, helpless, as they twirled into the night.
Storey Clayton is a current MFA candidate in Creative Nonfiction at West Virginia University and has worked as a youth counselor, debate coach, strategic analyst, development director, rideshare driver, and poker player. In the past year, his nonfiction has appeared or been accepted in over a dozen literary journals, including Mud Season Review, Typehouse Literary Magazine, Barely South Review, The Bookends Review, and North Dakota Quarterly. You can learn more about Storey at his personal website, The Blue Pyramid (bluepyramid.org).
