PROMISES KEPT; WHITE MALE PRIVILEGE

“THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE”

If you graduated from college with a four year degree, 1950-1970, the world was pretty much your oyster. It did not matter much at all what degree or discipline. Me? I enrolled in 1970 at East Carolina University and I was ready to go!!! I would eventually have a Business Degree from the University of Miami!

With that...the sky would be the limit. You could slip into the military with an officers’ commission. Recruiters from a vast array of corporate giants had staff on campuses (didn't they?), wooing and cajoling graduates, flying they (and families) here and there for interviews, giving sign-on bonuses, benefit packages with profit sharing, insurance, expense account allowances that are—-nowadays—unheard of. Caterpillar. GMC. General Mills. Phillips Petroleum. Eastern Airlines. Lever Brothers. Kellog. The array of US Government Civil Service. University systems. They competed FOR graduates. You chose your plum. I couldn't work hard enough, or more gratefully, to see my success hanging like low fruit!

I had grown up in this “reality”, 1950's to 1070's. I knew, without doubt, (nothing less ever entered my mind, nor was suggested) that all I had to do was finish up in Vietnam and the Marine Corps, go to college on the GI Bill, study hard, work hard, do reasonably well,  and they would line up for me. 

Yes. It meant 5 or 6 years of full time work, police midnight shift, and then keeping a full time college schedule—-sure!—-it meant 10-12 hour days, month after month, year after year, and weekends in the books, but this was a land of opportunity. It was a guarantee!! I worked myself to death for 5 years and it was right there—- who wouldn’t work like that, for a promise of economic success and professional challenge? Good money. Interesting work. 

Opportunity to compete at the highest levels. I thrilled at the thought, as I rolled out to in-progress burglary calls at 3 am, while my wife and little baby boys were tucked in the cheap apartments in “married student housing”— oh yeah. 

By 1976, I had finished college. I was ready to go.

But there were no recruiters to speak of. No one clamored for eager graduates.  No real high end jobs available. The recruiters did not compete for graduates. Graduates competed for appointments! We produced reams of resumes— spent day after day competing for an appointment to even be interviewed, and there were just a scarce few jobs...really not much at all -- for even 3.4 GPA students like me,  who were war veterans and had worked their way through. Not at all. Not any. The GRADUATES were the ones competing. The “recruiters” were "competing" by looking for grocery store assistant managers, fast food assistant managers, car salesmen, or life insurance sales-people—. A basic college grad was lucky to get an entry job anywhere. It really did not compute. I didn't see the futility, the crash, the empty promise I had chased. I did not get it. I get it now. 

I had been a police officer, going in. Had been promoted to police sergeant. So....when I finished 5 years of 10-12 hour days, working and going to school full time with a family, I had accomplished pretty much nothing. It had been a 7 year wheel spin. My job I had before graduation, as a police sergeant was best I could do after graduation. No jobs. No reward. No recruiters. The sad truth was, at that moment, I realized I had somehow been tricked, by my own idiotic vision of sugar plums, to waste 5-7 years of my life.

It was a financial, social and personal debacle and crushing disappointment (even a surprise). Even now, looking back, I see how horrible and crushing it was, and I was lucky that, due to my youth and ignorance—I didn’t realize just how horrible a disappointment it was. I had worked nearly 9 years of my life…four in the Marine Corps, 5 in college, all for pretty much nothing. 

I had purchased a small house in suburban Miami that I could ill-afford, in the knowledge that I would soon be in the chips. Instead, I was under horrendous debt, with no way to really go forward. I quickly exhausted resources...indeed took a job selling life insurance—and then, after a couple years, limped back to the police department and begged for my job back. 

I will never forget, sitting there that day, almost literally hat-in-hand, begging for my police job back. 

They gave it to me. A starting patrolman’s salary, rookie level. I was starting completely over, I had, by that time, put in 7 years, and was NOW, a college educated beginning patrolman, with no seniority, working for people that I had hired and sent to the academy. In every sense, it was 2 steps forward and 10 steps back. And a hole to dig out of.

In addition, I was completely broke, from two years of selling insurance and not making any money at all. Bouncing checks. House in arrears three months. No money for gas or transportation. I avoided bankruptcy simply because I didn’t even know what it was.

Yeah. It was great. I groveled for money to get by. Credit ruined, I couldn’t get a car. Bill collectors were my off-duty hobby. 

And I well remember morning after they tossed my diploma at me, across the clerk's window at the UM Bursar’s Office (I had to pick it up a month after graduation, since I still owed them money, they wouldn't give it to me)…. On that day, I was a police sergeant—soon to start selling insurance and losing my rank and seniority—and so it was going forward. Nothing had moved or happened. No opportunities had opened up. No one was bedazzled by my accomplishments. I had rather flushed 7-9 years down a toilet that emptied into a sewer going nowhere.