The lost generation

Subject: The lost generation.

"The lost generation" a termed coined in the 1930s to describe the youth of that generation and the destitution the economic events laid at their door has been rekindled in the 21st century. There have been similar cataclysmic economic upheavals in the intervening years not least the World War which forced the young men to pay the ultimate price.  Young people grow up today, only knowing the world they see, the consumer society, the society of predetermined rights, a welfare society where people are protected from the most dire economic consequences. This will undoubtedly effect them because they lack the perspective of people who have struggled through genuinely hard times or be able to understand what real hardship means.
The political establishment does't help. The political lie, that given your vote "I will represent you and your interests", is patently untrue, or the lurid newspapers headlines, blaming inequality on those most effected, by their very inequality, laying blame on their supposed lack of aspiration or a laziness born of the welfare state.
It all makes the estate kid despair.

When I was young the apprenticeship system was a way out of the cul-de-sac , it gave young people a sense of self respect, of achievement, a passport to find decent work and some sort of prosperity.

Today prosperity often only comes from crime or a win on the lottery, perhaps if your a good looker a chance to display on a dating show or, of course, the perennial way, marry a guy who is loaded. For the guys the future is more bleak, industry largely gone, their world has been further distorted by the weight of consumerism and the need to display your value by the trainers you wear or the car you buy. The value of  being open and supportive to others, or defining yourself, not in terms of how other people think of you but how you think of yourself is old fashioned. The throw away clothing bought cheap because of the cheapness we attach to the lives of the poor who slave in the Chinese factories to make them is never part of their thought process. The disconnect between price and value is all around us, the millions spent on advertising to disingenuously tell us the lie that the product is special and you need it.
How can the youth find their ethical footing when their leaders blatantly lie and unhesitatingly cover their lie with another. How does the mother protect her child when she is out covering two jobs just to pay the rent. How can we have sold off the security of municipal housing, of rent controlled homes when the vagrancy due to the uncertainty of meaningful employment was banished when a woman, yes a woman, sold off the nations stock of houses and put into place rules which made it impossible for councils to raise money to build more. When the maternal instinct for the weakest was lost in the Reaganite American dream of self progression.
The young, no matter how resilient need leadership, hopefully from a father, certainly a mother but if we now equate our working class as a 'caste', a class set aside, then the children of that caste will not forgive the class that put them there. We in this country have no religious dogma to hide behind, no mystical story telling of the many headed god, only the single minded god of money and the exclusivity that the gated society claims for itself. 
Mad Max was a fictional product of the cinema, a story of the tribe who lived outside of the gated estate and the terror they struck into the mind of people living in the estate.
Perhaps like many a fictional story, truth is never far from fiction.