What America will be like for my grandchildren, in 2040, if the conservatives have their way over the rest of this decade.
In the year 2040 my three grandchildren will be 34, 32, and 30. They may be married with children of their own. Of course if they are it will be to spouses of the opposite gender since same sex marriage will be illegal.
What type of education will they have had? What schooling will their children be able to look forward to. They had best find a way to make good salaries as their children may have to go to the expensive private schools that will dominate education in America. Public schools renamed Poor Schools will be only for those with no income and will be classes of 40 or more with low paid part time teachers. My grandchildren may have managed to get into college, if their parents could afford it, or they were brilliant enough to win scholarships, since student loans were no longer available, that program having been abolished in 2020.
As for jobs, what vocations my grandchildren pursue I can’t predict; if they pursue what we called in my day middle class blue collar or white collar jobs they will be paid low wages (the federal minimum wage being repealed in 2018); and even those jobs will be hard to come by with the increased outsourcing due to tax loopholes for multinational corporations. They will be on their own when it comes to getting raises or seeking family leave time since collective bargaining was outlawed for public employees in 2017 and it soon became a relic of the past for private sector workers.
My daughters will be 63 and 61 and since social security was privatized around 2015 they can’t look forward to much in the way of retirement income since when the market collapsed in 2019 they lost everything in their privatized voluntary pension plan. And expensive health care will be a challenge with the abolition of medicare in 2025. So my grandchildren will have to take care of their parents while they also try to finance some sort of education for their children and make ends meet for themselves.
There won’t be much in the way of trips and leisure for the kids since the national park system was privatized and now has become resorts for the rich, and with gas at $10 a gallon they can’t afford to drive there anyway.
Some may say this allegory is all an exaggeration. Not really. The conservatives today make no bones about their desire to repeal and abolish the progressive programs of the past 200 years. America in 2040, if the extreme right has its way, will, except for modern technological changes, be very similar to America in 1840. It really will be going Back to the Future. You can almost say we’ve been there and seen the future - it didn’t work for the great masses of Americans in 1840 and it won’t work for them in 2040.
But if one looks at the entire history of man it tells us that my great grandchildren just entering adulthood in 2040 will renew the progressive march and reclaim the American middle class dream and get this country moving again. Woodrow Wilson said that once in every 25 years the American people would rise up for reform. So maybe in 2036 my grandchildrens’ generation will rise to that challenge.
Perhaps they’ll find my papers and read about the programs I espoused when serving in the New York State Assembly and in Pennsylvania Democratic party politics. Perhaps they’ll find that quote from Abraham Lincoln that once guided the GOP “the legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done but can not do at all or can not so well do for themselves”. My grandchildren and their children after them may relearn the lessons of our past that the American people together are on an unstoppable march for progress and human dignity and that as Ma Joad said in The Grapes of Wrath – they survive, they just keep coming because they’re the people.
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