by Mercy Otis Warren II
As somebody who worked their way, first through college, and then graduate school, without financial help from anybody, the thought of “forgiving” somebody’s gender studies degree debt is simply infuriating. Why should someone who works for minimum wage at Target, or works with their hands, or busts their ass at a business they built from scratch, be forced to subsidize a bunch of ungrateful Millennials?
I hear that complaint. I agree with you. Can we all agree that being forced to fund another person’s stupid decisions violates every rule of self-responsibility in a free republic?
Whew….
Breathe…
Agreement. So hard to find in polarized society.
Now it’s time to play devil’s advocate. Not because I have a whole lot of sympathy for the skinny-jeaned soyboys out there rioting in the streets, throwing Molotov cocktails at police and voting for Joe Biden because he promised to wipe away that debt. Rather, I’d like to posit that these youngsters create a problem. A problem which affects the rest of us which won’t go away simply by laughing in their faces and saying, “Stupid idiot! Why should -I- be forced to pay your debt?”
If we don’t deal with this problem, these heavily indebted youngsters who are still living in Mommy’s basement at age 35 because they still owe $60,000 on their student loan debt, will continue to vote for whichever snake-oil-salesman promises them a way out of their dilemma.
Socialism is a philosophy of failure,
the creed of ignorance,
and the gospel of envy,
its inherent virtue
is the equal sharing of misery.
— Winston Churchill
Sure, it would be great if these Millennials would get a real job rather than sneering down at us from their minimum-wage gig at Starbucks or some Big Tech brainwashing factory. But the truth is, these kids have more in common with MAGA Nation than they do the Big Tech overlords and intellectual elite who keep whipping them up into a pro-socialist frenzy. The reason they can’t find work is because they got sold junk degrees, and then, when they went out into the labor market, they found themselves competing with the same scab-labor (temporary and illegal immigrants) and outsourcing that has doomed the rest of us to decreased expectations, underemployment, increased taxes and an expectation that our children will have it even worse than we did.
Newsflash. These are our children. Our ugly, entitled, bratty children, who keep “rebelling” because they got sold a raw deal by their guidance counselors, college recruiters, and even their own parents, and now they don’t know how to dig their way out of it because, even when they are willing to work 60 hours a week, they can’t find a decent job.
They talk about the failure of socialism
but where is the success of capitalism
in Africa, Asia and Latin America?
— Fidel Castro
MAGA Nation, we are the responsible ones. We work hard, start a family, pay our bills and respect the institutions which built this country. When you start taking on that kind of responsibility – to yourself, your family, and your children – the last thing you want is socialist claptrap about redistributing your hard-earned dollars to a bunch of slackers.
Alas, so long as these skinny-jeaned Millennial brats are unable to start a family because they’re too heavily in debt, MAGA Nation will never win, because the thirty-somethings who should support the American dream just don’t care about it because they’ve never experienced that dream themselves.
Do I have a solution? Sadly, no… Paying off these kids’ student loan debt resonates about as much as a death-metal drum solo during a Sunday church choir. We know that “free college tuition for everyone” is a taxpayer-funded boondoggle to keep socialist professors in their ivory towers, indoctrinating our kids with their dumbass ideas. Our kids are being taught to hate our country because “the system is against you.”
Yes, the system is against you. The same system which is against MAGA Nation.
Why does the guerrilla fighter fight?
… the guerrilla fighter is a social reformer,
he takes up arms responding to the angry protest
of the people against their oppressors,
and that he fights in order to change the social system
that keeps all his unarmed brothers
in ignominy and misery.
— Che Guevara
Telling these kids “you should have gone into plumbing” isn’t going to prevent the globalist-socialists from recruiting them as brainwashed footsoldiers to riot in the streets, clamoring to take down our country.
What is the solution?
First, we need to examine why these kids thought that going $250,000 in debt (the cost of a house) for a liberal arts degree that they could have gotten for free at the local library was a good idea. Who told them this? Their high school guidance counselor? Their parents? The college recruiter? Their local bank?
Guerrilla war is a kind of war waged by the few
but dependent on the support of many.
— B. H. Liddell Hart
When my 20-year-old friend went down to the local bank to take out a business loan to start her hair salon, the bank made her put up collateral, she had to get a co-signer, and she had to come up with a business plan to show she’d thought things through before they’d give her the loan. Even then, they only funded 1/3rd of what she initially asked for because that was all they thought she could earn. She had to scale down her business plan to something that would work, give up her apartment, move back in with her parents, downgrade her car to a clunker, and cut her spending to the bone. Her business was successful because she worked hard and paid down that debt almost immediately. But she also had guidance at the front-end of that process from a loan-officer who demanded she come up with a viable business plan.
Contrast that to your average student who, at 18 years old, with no prior work history or skills, is encouraged to take out the same amount of debt as an average house, with no collateral, no “business plan,” heck! The bank doesn’t even care if they intend to pursue a marketable degree from a halfway-decent college! Congress declared the federal government would be on the hook for as much student loan debt as the colleges could convince these kids to take on and there is no way to discharge that debt. Short of death, either you pay off your student loans, or the government will hound you into the grave.
Is it any wonder that colleges recruit “diverse” and “non-traditional students?” Most of these students come from backgrounds where their parents aren’t worldly enough to comprehend that the teacher-union backed guidance counselor, the college recruiter, or the loan officer at their local bank does not have their child’s best interests at heart. They sell these kids a bunch of horse manure that a college degree is their only path to success. And then, when that pathway evaporates because it never existed, they blame “systematic racism” and encourage them to take down “the system” rather than tell them the truth, that they just spent four years of their lives and $250,000 getting a junk degree.
In such a society as ours
the only possible chance for change,
for mobility, for political,
economic, and moral flow
lies in the tactics of guerrilla warfare,
in the use of fictions, of language.
— Kathy Acker
I’m not excusing these kids’ stupid decisions. It was their decision, and they have to live with that. But while they’re heavily in debt, unable to get a good-paying job, and unable to start a family, they’re a nonstop problem that you and I have to deal with. They’re destabilizing the country.
Again, I think of my friend who started a business right out of technical high school while I went away to college. Had she gone belly-up, instead of paying off her debt, she would have been able to file for bankruptcy and shove those debts right back up the asses of whatever loan officer had been stupid enough to loan her money. Sure, she’d have been plagued with bad credit and paying cash for 7 to 10 years until the bankruptcy disappeared off of her credit score, but that debt would have been gone. Other than the inconvenience of paying cash or sweet-talking somebody into providing collateral before embarking on a brand-new business venture, she would have been able to move on to the next stage of her life.
Adulthood. Real adulthood. Adultier adulthood. The kind where you get married, have kids and raise a family…
Contrast with the average pink-haired “I’m gender-fluid” Millennial with a Fine Art degree and $80,000 worth of student loan debt. For a lucrative fee, banks loaned someone who couldn’t pay it back far more money than was sensible for a degree they knew was junk, and then they got to slough it off on the taxpayers rather than explain to their shareholders why they were stupid enough to lend an 18-year-old that kind of money.
The same goes for the colleges who sold Miss Pink Pussy Hat her junk degree. If a supplier sold my best friend defective salon chairs, fancy sinks that leaked, and perming chemicals that burned the hair off of her customer’s heads, my friend could have sued them to get her money back. But Miss Punk Pussy Hat is stuck, because colleges aren’t held to the same standards of not selling gullible 18-year-olds crap that every other business in the nation is subject to.
Without the consent and active aid of the people, the guerrilla
would be merely a bandit, and could not long survive.
–John Tabor, “The War of the Flea”
Again, this doesn’t excuse these kids’ stupidity. But these kids are in a jam, and telling them, “you were stupid” is only delivering the future of this nation into the hands of the socialists, who tell them it’s nobody’s fault except the evil white supremacists instead of ‘sic’ing them on the school guidance counselors, corrupt bankers, crap-colleges and politicians who got them into this mess.
If we don’t help them, the socialists will … by stealing our money and giving it to the corrupt universities, banks, and politicians who put them in this situation in the first place….
How can we solve this problem? I don’t know… Allow them to discharge part of it in bankruptcy and pay off the rest? Sue the college? Do some kind of public service project where their debt gets forgiven after a specified period of time? I don’t think it’s fair that I had to work three jobs while going to school part-time to get my degree debt-free, but these kids got to party on student loans, and then expect to pay back nothing. But maybe, instead of mocking your dumb@$$ Millennial nephew the next time he laments that Bernie Sanders didn’t win the Democratic primary, maybe we could ask if they are doing okay? Is there anything you can do to help? Explain what -I- just explained, that maybe they got sold a junk degree, and then ask them who they think should be made to pay?
While having that dialogue, explain they’re not the only ones getting shafted by globalization, the outsourcing of jobs, corrupt politicians and unfair competition from legal and illegal labor.
The idea of capitalism is not just success
but also the failure that allows success to happen.
— P. J. O’Rourke
It’s time to figure out how to solve this problem together. Because if we don’t, the people pulling the puppet-strings for Joe Biden and our worthless RINO’s will continue to recruit these kids to riot in the streets, vote them into office, and usher in Mao’s Cultural Revolution – USA Edition.
Let’s make America great again for all of us. Even dumbass Millennials….
Mercy Otis Warren II lives in occupied territory in a deep blue state. She’s a recovering liberal, deeply patriotic, a “crappy but consistent Catholic,” and writes screenplays which will never get made because Hollywood is hopelessly liberal and Mercy likes to poke fun at virtue-signaling.
You can read her other articles HERE: http://seraphim-press.com/mercy-otis-warren/
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