My husband met an old friend from high school last week in the small
Mississippi town where they'd grown up 32 years ago . They chatted
about their classmates from the white, middle class
private school they had attended. Slightly less than half of the men
had graduated from college and gone on to get jobs in business,
teaching, and civil engineering. Slightly more than half of the men had
not gone on to graduate from college. They were
all dead, mostly from drugs or suicide. 10% of all the men in their
class had committed suicide in the last five years. His friend noted
that more men had died from their class than had died so far from his
parents' class -- and his parents had graduated at the height of the
Vietnam War. While the women had done slightly better, there had been
fewer children born to the members of their class than had been in their
class. It was a sobering experience.
I think we might have a problem, folks.
