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Murry Frymer
My Children! (Go for the Cold, Hard Cash!) |
Make your pile when you're young,
then endow a chair at Stanford
By
MURRY FRYMER
of TheColumnists.com
It's awfully hard to offer advice to your kids these days. I long for the day when you could take your son aside and breathe in his ear: "One word. Plastic!"
I guess you wouldn't advise your kids to go into plastic anymore. And, sure, you could say "Computers" or "Cyberspace" or one of those silicon terms, if indeed I understood them as well as I wished. But, oh, times are moving very fast. Very fast. I went into newspaper work, a word my father never breathed to me, and it never was a hot field. Right now there is some doubt it will even exist in another generation or so.
And while Bill Gates certainly chose well, even dynamic Microsoft is not a sure thing anymore. Nor is going to work for General Motors.
Actually, when I was picking and choosing from the career possibilities of my time, I and my friends disdained the materialists in our midst who took the road down what they perceived as the gilded path. No, we truly believed that money wasn't everything. At least not at the first junction. Young people were supposed to have ideals, seek to make this a better world, march for civil rights and world peace. You remember that stuff?
Then the later generations came along and decided that the road to world peace was to be built upon layers and layers of prosperity. It was not only more comfortable to be rich, it was idealistic, too. After all, didn't Andrew Carnegie give us Carnegie Hall? And what would we do without Rockefeller's railroads?
For all I know, today's Yuppies have it right. Rich is better. Make your pile when you're young and endow a chair at Stanford. They will love you more there than their poli sci major who wants to reform the financing of political campaigns, a quaint idea these days as the buying of candidates has never been more popular.
Get rich. Get filthy rich. Basketball players whose SATs were near illiterate come back to the campus and build their alma maters new arenas. That's a good boy!
So your kid comes to you and says, "Dad, I want to be a teacher," or "I want to do legal aid." And you say: -------?
Sure, we NEED teachers. Maybe do it for six months and get it out of your system. Then go visit Hewlett Packard and see what THEIR needs are. If they have a stock-sharing plan, why in a half-dozen years you can build your own school as a charitable donation to the inner city.
I used to believe that newspaper work was idealistic work. Don't snicker, I really did. I told my parents that reporters uncovered vice and crime and corruption and exposed it and made this a better world. I thought that was the newspaper business.
Well, in some places it still is, sort of. But there's a lot more to it than that. When has a newspaper ever exposed its leading advertiser? Heck, if Richard Nixon had bought full page ads in the Washington Post every day, he might never have had to deny being a crook.
No, the business of America is business, as Mr. Coolidge said (I think) and he didn't say much. Yeah, that's the word you breathe in the kid's ear. Or maybe just take him aside and say, "Money!" Plastic may come and go, but the luster of money never dims. These are the days when the pursuit of money, in any guise, is almost all there is.
Somewhere, some kids still become teachers, but they are widely assumed to be incapable of anything else (actually that is an old theory). And there are still journalism majors, though they all want to do their reporting on the Internet (the more-lucrative Internet) or at least replace Dan Rather.
No, it's hard to advise your kids without appearing either hopelessly out of date, or tragically cynical. Well, I'm glad that kids don't listen anyway. But if they want to advise me, I'm all ears.
© 2000 by Murry Frymer
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