Reunion

So it was time for my big 50^th Yale reunion, and I was filled with so many feelings over those four short days. Courses for alumni in emotional intelligence and biodiversity. An interview to our class with classmate George W Bush. We were one of the last two all-male undergraduate classes at that university. Lots of stories from privileged wealth and those with luxurious retirements (a word that makes me cringe), those who are still struggling, remembering those who died (from casualties during the Vietnam War to nature’s cruel attrition) including wives and children… and gathering a snapshot of how Yale fits into the current chaotic world around us.

I was gratified to see very little support for, and lots of rather passionate criticism of, Donald Trump and his deeply negative impact on the status of the presidency. Even among conservatives, his mendacious style and complete inability to tolerate a free and open press were troublesome. In a class where the dominant professions were concentrated heavily in four fields – law, medicine, finance and academia – the consistency of negative conversation about Donald Trump was everywhere.

Even stalwart ultra-conservatives, happy that corporate America is doing better than it ever has (at least in market valuation) and that unemployment is particularly low, there was a very uneasy feeling about the immediate future. About the almost certain negative economic impact of the new trade wars and a rather surprising acknowledgement of how shallow the jobs picture (and the underlying median real wage rates) really is and how our overall economic picture unravels quickly when you look at the underlying forces at work here and around the world. While many are enjoying the benefits of the tax reform act, they easily acknowledge that there will be a longer-term price to pay… as many in finance relocate from NYC (with high and mostly undeductible state taxes) to their second homes in low or no income tax states.

While I still hold George W Bush (who ignored his father’s advice on the subject) responsible for literally handing Iraq into Iran’s firm grip (the regional Shiite cabal) by deposing (Sunni) Saddam Hussein, escalating destabilization in the Middle East by quantum leaps for decades to come, his sentiments on Donald Trump and current GOP policies was refreshing. While he tried to avoid naming Donald Trump specifically, he often slipped up.

It’s pretty clear that W deeply dislikes Trump: “I didn’t vote for him.” He feels the United States now has a heartless foreign and domestic policy, dislikes Trump’s slam on immigrants, thinks Trump should support a critical free press as a democratic necessity, feels that Trump should have given up tweeting the day he was elected (noting that such continuing tweets seriously erode the stature of the office), believes that trade wars can create very deep economic decline and that isolationism and go-it-alone international initiatives will severely harm America’s power and influence for decades to come. Interesting. But we also learned a bit about how our students are impacted by an overly-competitive world.

The hard statistics presented in some of those academic classes offered to alumni were eye-opening, along with parallel conversations with a few of the undergrads still at the university after classes and exams had passed. Research tells us that 40% of America’s undergraduates will seek serious mental health counseling at some critical time in their undergraduate years. The primary emotive words elicited from college students today about school include “stress,” “anxiety,” “exhaustion” and “loneliness.” They are overwhelmed, many to the point of being unable to do much of anything. The academic stress extends down into high school, at least among children aiming for the better colleges, but when many schools try and lighten the load of high schoolers getting 4-5 hours of sleep on average, parents often complain that their kids will not be able to compete to get into good schools.

Anecdotally, my conversations with some of those undergrad hold-overs (many to work on our reunion) were equally revealing. Half a century ago, just about everyone intended to continue their educations into some form of graduate or professional school. But talking to sophomores and juniors today, that thought was no longer uniformly ubiquitous. Young men and women even in vigorous math or scientific disciplines were often at a loss at their post-undergraduate plans. Career paths and further education.

One obviously mega-gifted young woman from Brooklyn, New York City – majoring in “computer sciences in the arts” – explained why she needed to expand beyond a major purely focused on comp-sci. For every hour of comp-sci class (and generally there are three class hours per week in each course), there were 15 hours of writing code… which if you take two or more comp-sci courses creates “life impossible.” So she needed to dilute that schedule demand. Even as Yale’s newly focused faculty on emotional intelligence and more humanistic educational goals is considered a leader in that field, Yale College imposes schedules and course requirements that cut deeply into any possibility of reducing that stress and anxiety. Will they get that together? One would hope.

And on the other end of hope – true hopelessness among those whose lives did not embrace schooling and skills – was the experience of an orthopedic surgeon who worked out of a major university hospital in the Sacramento, California area. He has been deluged with young people – whom he described as absolutely unemployable and seriously physically and mentally damaged – by the drug addiction they use to escape their reality. His description of the young men and women he treats, bodies and bones seriously and permanently decimated by addictions to crystal meth, was staggeringly sad. It rekindled my own readings about those once-highly-paid blue collar workers (particularly in the coal mines) who have lost their jobs and will never, never get them back despite pledges to the contrary from Donald Trump. Wherever that job loss is heavy, so rise the addiction rates to OxyContin, meth and fentanyl-laced heroin. The other America. Trump’s America.

While I enjoyed seeing old friends and talking about old times, the reunion clearly reflected the confusion and chaos of the world around us. There was so much more sadness and frustration than joy at the legacy our generation seems to have left to the generations behind us. We were once among the best and the brightest. Where did we go wrong? How did we get here? And can the rising generations take over and fix our mess?

I’m Peter Dekom, and I look back on my own life and think how I might have made things just a tiny bit different if I had become more socially and politically active earlier in my career.