I personally identify with the characters in Bon Jovi’s ballad, “Livin’ on a Prayer”. My wife and I had to struggle to make our way in the world. Looking back, it was hard. Keeping food on the table for the kids and making rent was a grind. Working the temporary, part time, and occasional job while going to school stretched our endurance and patience. It’s the act of striving, though, that is necessary for building character. Without it, who knows, our human development would have been stunted.
I keep this in mind as politicos appeal to our vanity to get our votes. Their refrain is that it’s someone else’s fault, that somebody else is holding us down. We are victims of hazy, generalized “elites”, “globalists”, the “top 1%”, the patriarchy, “whiteness”, a nearly endless and fuzzy collection of others. “The deck is stacked”, we are reminded. We have no more agency than a six-year-old. They offer more government goodies to suspend us in greater dependency. Today, it’s true of the Right and Left.
Trump and MAGA offer an insulated and perpetual economic playpen under a plethora of subsidies (no tax on tips, Social Security, overtime, and crony capitalism) and protective tariffs. No need to worry about competition. Our bankrupting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are mostly held above reproach. We get to slide our way to insolvency while content in our firm belief in the unbelievable.
The Left, meaning the Democratic Party in toto, screech the loudest for debilitating dependency. Their response to creative destruction is for everybody to be a coder, and, of course, more government bennies. Biden declared war on coal and his retort to those with a big fat crosshair on their livelihoods was (see #1), “Anybody who can go down 300 to 3,000 feet in a mine, sure in hell can learn to program as well . . . .” There you have it. He’s going to kill your jobs and communities. As for you, just go pound sand . . . in college. Biden promised that the rest of us will pick up the tab.
If you’re 23 and still haven’t “found yourself”, Nancy Pelosi boasts that a young adult can cling to their parents’ healthcare policy till age 26. She gushed in 2009 during the Obamacare debate (see #2):
“Just think of the difference that this would make for young people. They’ll be able to do what they want to do without having to find a job that has healthcare benefits.”
There you have it; their answer to the discomforts of striving is to make somebody else pay for it. It is so outrageous if wasn’t so pitiful. Extend adolescence to your mid-twenties.
Juxtaposed is Bon Jovi’s reality of striving, the painful, sometimes slow, grasping for the next rung in upward mobility. It’s how life becomes a molder of men and women. The formula for entering the middle class hasn’t changed: get married, stay married, have kids, work hard, and never stop learning, in no particular order. At times, it’ll seem like you’re “livin’ on a prayer”. Good, prayer is a good thing.
Please listen to the lyrics of Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer”. It could well be the anthem of our initiation into adulthood. In Latin, Carpe Diem.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Biden Suggests Coal Miners Learn to Code To Be Prepared for ‘Jobs of the Future’”, James Crowley, Newsweek, 12/31/2019, at https://www.newsweek.com/joe-biden-new-hampshire-campaign-code-1479913.
2. “Pelosi appeals to youth in health bill”, Mike Soraghan, The Hill, 10/14/2009, at https://thehill.com/homenews/house/52350-pelosi-appeals-to-youth-in-health-bill/.