Debt is Wonderful (*deluding myself*)

I’ve got this whole Google+ thing going on, and today I posted this long comment about something that has been frustrating me today:

I’m having one of those “WTF was I thinking when I decided to go to college and take on $31,000 in debt for an English degree, which I’d defer for 6 years while going to grad school, after which I’d be lucky to get a job in my field, let alone make anything over $20K a year” moments. And I’m telling myself that “yes, it’s worth it, because you love literature and teaching and all the things that come with being in academia and getting to study what you love and writing about it and spending your days participating in its communities.” Because I do. 

But that still leaves a debt on my head that I’ll spend the next 20 years trying to pay off on a salary that society deems I barely deserve, despite the fact that what I do is essential for society to function. The world crumbles without people like me teaching young kids and adults and the like how to read and write. The world cannot sustain itself without language. But heaven forbid that we pay the creators of society, the first line of defense against barbarism, anything close to what they deserve. 

Excuse me while I have some kind of weird existential crisis about life…

I suppose some people would say, “Well, you decided to do this, so it’s your own fault that you’re in debt,” but then I think about all the countries where their citizens go to school for free or for very little whatsoever, without having to have full time jobs and the like, and it makes me wonder whether I got my early education in the right place.  I once wanted to go to school in England.  Maybe I should have.

Don’t get me wrong.  Where I’m at now, I’m not paying anything in loans (technically, unless
I’m having financial stupidity), but my undergraduate career can be summed up as “this is how you rack up more debt than people in 1920 knew what to do with in cash form.”  The sad truth is that this will keep going on, and nothing will change it. America is more classist now than it ever was, and it will stay that way until the people getting effed over do something about it, whether by voting or rising up and saying, “to hell with this bullshit.”

But then again, maybe this is how you keep a disenfranchised populace complacent:  load them up with too much debt for them to do anything sizable with their lives beyond pumping out more babies for the consumption machine  and devoting themselves to the monthly-payment-model.

I’ll shut up about my political mumbo jumbo now.  Maybe something normal will spring up in the next day or so.  By normal I mean “something science fiction or fantasy based.”  You know, like a novel chapter, or some rant about a movie…