We Are Not All Victims

In a minor fit of annoyance, I recently wrote about how The Ladders’ Mark Cendella gave the middle finger to older workers in its newsletter.  In response, people have sent me links of just about every type of worker that is facing discrimination or difficult times, whether by age, race, education, or whatever.

Woe to be an older worker, since older workers are, well, old and not with the times, and no one wants to hire them.

Except, woe to be a Millennial, who has to work three menial part time jobs and live in your parents’ basement.

Or woe to be mid-career, where you are facing the prospect of temporary contractor jobs indefinitely.

Or to be blue-collar in the oil industry, which has recently shed 200,000 well-paying jobs.

Seriously, you can find anyone of any race, location, or age in any circumstance. And so-called experts who are willing to find fault with a society that lets each individual circumstance happen.  I’m starting to think that it is the media that is turning us all into victims, explaining how people just like us in some way are getting the shaft, presumably while everyone else is taking the elevator.

To be fair, I try not to judge the media too harshly. I was a tech journalist, and probably about the last of a breed that made a decent living off of it.  News journalism, except at the very top of the ladder, is poorly paid and unappreciated.  Further, the only way to derive revenue in news is to get a lot of people to read it.  So they present everyday people as, well, victims, usually of a society that they think has failed them.

But most of us have advantages and disadvantages in life, whether brought on by personal characteristics, demographics, life choices, education, and a host of other things. Most of the time they balance out so that we are able to live a decent if average life.  In some outlying cases, there is a cornucopia of riches; in others, a continuing chain of disillusionment.

I would like to see our media focus less on that chain of disillusionment. It does no one any good, including your readership and probably not your bottom line.  “There are eight million stories in the naked city”; I call upon the media to find some of the others.