Had a good chat with my landlady and the head maintenance man today.  I’ll probably get new blinds and new carpet in my apartment within a few weeks.  After looking over my carpet and blinds she acted quite astonished that I hadn’t been complaining about these problems for years.  The carpet in my apartment is well over twenty years old and I haven’t had good blinds on my windows since I moved in ten years ago.  The carpet has been getting worn and even tearing at the seams for five years.  Yet I never complained to her or any of my previous land lords about maintenance issues.  I never complained about any issues in my apartment because it has been my experience ever since early childhood that no one was going to take my complaints seriously.  Nothing ever changed when I voiced displeasure.  Not only did almost no one take my problems seriously, some people flat out stated I brought my problems on myself or they weren’t even problems at all.  I am used to my elders and leaders not helping me, especially when I have legitimate complaints.  That is why I don’t talk about my problems until they become major crises.

My entire life no one took me or my problems seriously.  No one cared when I was getting bullied at school, not my teachers, not my family, not my classmates, and sometimes not even my friends.  No one cared when I was fired from my McDonald’s job at age seventeen for overcooking maybe $10 worth of hamburgers on a grill.  No one cared for the first three years of my mental illness that I was having problems that wasn’t normal teenage angst.  No one cared when I couldn’t find a decent job immediately after college, let alone acknowledged the fact that many college graduates weren’t finding the decent jobs we were told a college degree would lead to. So forgive me for not voicing my complaints and trusting authority sooner.

Not only were my problems not taking seriously by my elders, my teachers, my bosses, and my landlords, most of the problems of people in my age bracket and younger weren’t taken seriously either.  The elder generations apparently don’t care that their kids have greater college debts than what most of them ever owed on their houses.  Most of my elders complain about their kids not being responsible for not marrying at age twenty two or not having a fifty grand a year job right out of college.  Yet my elders’ parents were complaining about how immature they were during the 1960s when they were doing drugs, burning draft cards,starting riots on college campuses, and doing free love. You may have forgotten your history but I, and millions of people in my age bracket and younger, have not. And I guarantee the “greatest generation” had their detractors in their parents’ generation.  Tragically, people in my generation are already complaining about their kids.  So it goes…….

It’s like once you hit a certain age, maybe late 30s or early 40s, get a few gray hairs, a little authority, a little hard of hearing, and a bit of a pot belly, you magically forget the problems you went through in your teens and twenties trying to get established and how your elders were usually critics and detractors.  Most of the encouragement I ever got was from people in my age bracket, not my elders.  I can count on less than two hands the teachers I had in thirteen years of public school who were encouraging and not indifferent.  My elders have the guts to think my generation and our children’s generation should be happy to fund their social security without doing any kind of overhaul to the system to make it more feasible and sustainable.  Social Security, as it’s run now, is a giant pyramid scheme.  It works well as long as enough tax revenue is coming in to keep the system running.  But with fewer people working to keep the system going, problems will come unless we do some restructuring.  We might have to increase corporate taxes to fund social security.  We may have to legalize street drugs and prostitution and tax those to fund the system.  We may have to raise the minimum age for social security.  We may have to do all of these and more.  What we are doing now is starting to no longer work.  And no one seems interested in seriously changing anything.

People wonder why I don’t complain.  I do complain, just not to anyone in any kind of authority.  I don’t complain to anyone in authority because until very recently no one took my problems seriously.  So do forgive me if I have an unhealthy distrust of my elders and anyone with any kind of authority.