For those who have students loans and are protesting in the Occupy America run by progressive organizations and their union thugs with names such as the SEIU, you got exactly what you wanted.
You told the banks you were going to go to a school, usually one of your choice, to get an education that would allow you to pay the money back.
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| Typical thinking of a Commie? “It’s so thrilling,” says Van Jones. The former Obama adviser is a founder of the American Dream Movement, whose inaugural conference kicked off Monday in Washington, D.C., with a live feed from the demonstrations. The protesters, he says, “are calling the conscience of America back to this economic catastrophe. Nobody has been able to do that.” |
You had to know some of these Ivy League universities have Marxist professors who are not in the business for your success, just your indoctrination and their success.
The banks then gave you the loan YOU ASKED for with a generous payback plan that wouldn't start until your graduation. The fact you chose a university that wanted maybe $50,000 a year while its own endowments are filled with billions of dollars with annual return on investment up to 20% is not the bank's problem. The banks invested in your future, not the university's. They are the ones who took your money.
It was the banks, not the university, that took the risk of giving you money hoping to get it back when you found your dream job, the one you told them you would have if they would only give you the loan. You're the one who should have instead gone for an inexpensive education if your mommy and daddy couldn't afford to send you.
Therefore, you should be beating your Occupy America drums in front of the university that screwed you, not the bank that gave you the loan.
State schools, junior colleges, and job training centers help you get started on your own feet when you don't have the big bucks. If you're smart in learning, you can quickly go to the head of the class. Once you get your bearings without a huge debt over your head, you can always save and later attend the school you want when you have the bread in hand and a better understanding of what these universities can and cannot provide for you. That's what many of today's grandparents did.
Today's protesting youth have rarely seen the real poverty that exists in countries such as Africa, their thinking poverty is not having a SmartPhone.
Another Road Less Traveled
When coming out of college I had almost no money and had to make some tough choices if I wanted a chance to succeed using the cards that had been shuffled to me. To that end, I attended a small teacher's college in the midwest. I cleaned toilets, washed dishes, and took out a few student loans to get a degree.
I ran out of money in the first year of getting my masters and had to move on to teach high school at about $400 above the poverty level. It was a job and it paid the rent until I could decide where to move on to next. During that time I worked factory jobs in the summer when I was off from teaching, which included a steel mill and beer factory.
Gradually I did move up in the teaching field. But after ten years I pushed aside the boring guaranteed tenure and went into the business world where I knew if I couldn't do the job, I would be fired. There I found a home in the electronics trade for over two decades, traveling all over North America. Later I was able to move into a national sales promotion position where I produced industrial videos for a Fortune 100 company, working with video production vendors in New York City and Los Angeles.
In 2002 I was downsized and took advantage of some retraining to learn a new career skill. I chose Web design and five months later I had a diploma from the Chubb Institute. It lead to contract work with the TSA for a season and got me over the last hump to the age of retirement. Now at 70 years old, I use the same Web-based skill to maintain this Web site as a hobby that keeps me active to stay mentally upbeat.
My grandparents were legal immigrants to America in the mid 1920s. My grandfather brought a wife and three sons to America after working on the railroad in the midwest for several years to save enough money for their trip in steerage.
Two of his sons would die before graduating high school, while a third, my father, went missing off of Okinawa in 1944 in WWII and was later found. My grandmother was devastated, but moved on.
My grandfather's formal education back in the old country was not recognized in America. So he used his skills at the huge estates in Westchester County, New York, working as an assistant gardner. He lived in what was called the servant's quarters. As a young boy, some of my fondest memories were of those lovely homes tucked away in wooded areas. Later he was able to make it to retirement in southeastern coast of Florida with his wife, where he is buried.
I finally earn a decent income in my late 30's. While having little savings, I couldn't afford to send my kids to college. But I did finally provide them with a nice home in a good neighborhood with excellent schools, little league and soccer fields just steps from the front door. Moving on in life on their own, they had the benefit of the "School of Hard Knocks," an education too many Americans have forgotten about. For those that have forgotten, it's the school that built this nation in the first place.
One son graduated from Parris Island, serving for a period in Afghanistan in the U.S. Marines. The others, now in their early thirties, took the same path I did in working their way up in the world. One is in executive management in a tech company while the other has a successful distribution route for a popular product sold around the world. Both make more than I did later at 40 with a college education.
If not needing to go into a field where extensive technical training is needed, sometimes its better to head for the less expensive bottom rung of a ladder that would lead to a job based on self-achieved abilities, charm, elbow grease, and business savvy picked up along the way. Staying there allows one to build the final step needed in a career; a reputation of reliability and cause for self-achievement.
It proves again that Life is a Journey, not a Guided Tour, like some young students want it to be.
Too many of those may be at Occupy America, beating silly drums that one day will come back to haunt them for wasting the time doing another's bidding while crapping in alleys and pissing in storefronts.
Fetching the faux dreams of older progressives from the 70s, who failed in their liberalism, steals one away from their destiny. And that can be typical for some of these yuppies who never grew up, although many of their parents were the ones who saved America from destruction in WWII. Many of their children became a generation that too many times had a silver spoon shoved up their ass, whining later as young adults while burning their draft cards and cussing their country on foreign soil as Bill Clinton had done. He protested all the wealth too, later in life giving his daughter a five-million dollar wedding. Do I need to repeat the hypocrisy?
Living in America you have no excuse for saying "I can't" That's because the real answer might be, "You won't."
One of my sons used to borrow money when he was at your age, saying he wasn't going to be cog in the wheel. I finally asked him, Then why do you borrow from one?
