… if their “choices” didn’t make their attitudes towards everyone else so fricking smug.
Here’s the deal, ladies: you were such bitches during the 90s and naughties about how superior you were that you managed to obstruct the efforts of working mothers to get better after school child care and other things that you are now just realizing you desperately needed.
And you dissed the very people you now wish to become.
The rest of us slogged through the childrearing years as best we could with zero help from you and your holier-than-thou crowd showing up at school board meetings lording it over everyone else. I was there. We battled it out in corporate America and in the suburbs, where you couldn’t be bothered with us, but were always around to offer a generous dollop of guilt about how much volunteer work you did. Hey, when you work a full time job, raise two kids, take classes in the evening and stay up until 1am arguing with a bunch of clueless libertarians over the construction of a new high school for three years, you tend to think that the Opt-out generation has got a lot of nerve criticizing the rest of us about chaperoning the class field trip. (Did that too.)
Now, you want your old jobs back and are surprised that you can only make a fraction of your former paychecks and, geewillikers, it’s hard to take care of kids and work at the same time. No shit, sherlocks. What do you think we’ve been putting up with since we graduated from college? What do you think the job market’s been like since the Little Depression when the economy came crashing in on our heads after your husbands blew up the world? Cry me a river and go tell it to the chaplain. You really owe us an apology first.
And here’s what they’ve been opting out of (from the same article):
Men, too, are feeling the crunch of excessively demanding work. They now report more work-life stress than women do, according to the Families and Work Institute. They also may be penalized more than women if they try to accommodate their work schedules to the needs of their children, as research appearing in the June issue of The Journal of Social Issues shows. It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that some husbands find themselves eyeing their wives’ lives at home with envy. “Men want to say we’re more than a paycheck,” Ted Mattox told me. “There has to be something more than going to work for 50 years and dying.”
Yes, but that’s the American Way where we work harder than any other developed country on earth and, unlike every other developed country on earth, have zero mandated paid vacation days.
If you don’t like the way this America works, you’ve got to change America.
Opting out is not an option.
Filed under: General | Tagged: drop out generation, New York Times Magazine, professional women turned stay at home moms |
The Confluence 
Or how about opting out of the high-cost living areas? Your posts about moving to a more affordable (and kinder) city have been very interesting. First the idea, then the plans, the preparations, the move. Each step of a deliberate path.
It doesn’t have to be work/not work. If we live in a more affordable location then we have more flexibility about the jobs we take.
Me? I’m fed up with people who believe that the choices they’ve made are THE ONLY choice. So that smugness annoys me too.
Wow! Great rant! Brave lady!
you go girl! glad to see you back in full rant after your upstakes move to pittsburgh and your gardening and landscaping and I don’t know what-all…
keep punching above your weight class!! You’re good at it!
Oops, I didn’t know that image would post. 🙄
Apparently, Spammy doesn’t like it. 😛
Off topic: It seems a newly discovered planet, GJ 540b, is a purplish-pink color. Here’s an artist’s conception.
With apologies to John Mellencamp:
Ain’t that the universe, for you and me
Ain’t that the universe, something to see
Ain’t that the universe, home of the free
Giant pink planets for you and me…
I’m not sure where the “one of us should stay home exclusively while the other deals with the working world” model originated, but in this day and age it is kind of not working, just saying.
When I graduated from HS, a HS grad male could reasonably expect to support a wife and children on his income. In a house. That model, as you call it, came out of the roaring economy after WWII and lasted, maybe, 20 or 30 years before the squeeze began to be felt. By the 80s, it was all but done for the working class. Not to say some people didn’t batten down the budgets and continue on one income, but newly graduated HSers had to adjust their expectations and their lifestyles. And the business of college degrees being required for entrée to decent jobs was very much part of the jobs market when I graduated college in the late 60s. We used to half joke that pretty soon, you’d need a PhD for a janitor’s job.
The economy and jobs are reverting to pre WWII conditions.
I hope no one takes this as sexist but another wrinkle is the stay-at-home mom crowd showing back up in the professional workforce after a twenty year hiatus and expecting to immediately be promoted to a position “fit for my age peers.” Meanwhile, we thunks have been grinding away for 30+ years to get those positions.
I guess the Opt Outs believed that vicious Hollywood fantasy, Kramer vs. Kramer, where mom dropped out, ditches the kid and husband and comes back to mega money and a VP job. I hated that movie. Walked out on it. Even back then, things were hardly so easy and they are even harder now. The darned thing won five Oscars including Best Picture.
That, says the net, was made in 1979. And slog it out Dustin Hoffman was dumped on, like the typical worker in the decades since then. That was the only part of the “reality” that made any sense.
Back in that era I was going through my MBA classes. One of them, on Labor Relations, had half of the class members being union officers (usually from overseas). It was obvious from talking with them (and their class comments) that workers in Europe had it better than workers in the States and the gap, at the time, was growing. Alas, the US future bore more resemblance to what the workers in some third world countries were going through (there was a guy from Indonesia). Of course, US companies outsourced production to those third world spots and started treating our own people worse and worse.
http://sadpanda.us/images/1793611-Y5FFYTT.jpg
Accompanying article from Cannonfire–NSFW for a few F-bombs.
http://cannonfire.blogspot.com/2013/08/yes-we-scan.html
Off topic: This Charming Charlie.
Someone took Smiths lyrics (maybe solo Mozz as well) and put them into Peanuts word balloons.
http://thischarmingcharlie.tumblr.com/
The hyenas are fighting over the rotting carcass of American Industry after the Willards of Wall Street finished it off. Too bad for us that Obama is more interested in flying a drone up some goat herds butt than acting like a Democrat. Good luck to anybody trying to re-enter the work force, it ain’t gonna happen as there is too much competition for too few jobs.
I’m nearing retirement but when I look around at work and realize what today’s young men and women have to look forward to it gets damn depressing. We got the word that our facility might be relocated, read that as moved to get rid of the union then hire temp workers. Our facility set records in customer satisfaction and efficiency but that means nothing to some MBA suit figuring to save on costs. I asked (but got no answer) how much quality and customer loyalty are they willing to sacrifice per labor dollar saved.
The worst is getting all these e-mails from progressive sites that I donated to in the past telling me to clap harder (give > $) and it will be better. Or Dem gimmie letters, as if. Where is my Single Payer, or infrastructure repair works?
Democrats in Washington and Harrisburg don’t work for me so why should I do for them anymore?
Rodeo clown in Bush mask = good. Rodeo clown in Obama mask = bad. Why is that?
Loved my “paid vacation days” when I had a corporate job. That meant that I had to anticipate the work that would come in before I went on vacation and do it in addition to the normal load plus catch up on what I missed after I returned. Of course, no one could serve as a stand-in since understaffing was intentional. There were excuses for under hiring, and my favorite was that the economy didn’t look good in Europe several years ago, ergo, no recs for hiring.