CSotD: A Crisis of Politeness
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On the topic of things you shouldn’t have to be told, Gary Varvel (Creators) depicts a kid gleefully heading off to the College of His Choice, leaving a pair of apparently bankrupt parents behind.
He’s got a point, given that the kid is headed for State U and not Rich Kid Private Emporium, because even public colleges are becoming outrageously expensive.
The system is, at best, unresponsive to the needs of families, starting with the notion of “saving for college” which simply means that much less financial aid when you get there.
Whether a college kid needs a refrigerator or a car is considerably secondary to that, though I note that, when my kids went to college, the school put them in touch with their prospective roommate so they could sort out who was bringing what. A drop in the bucket, but those drops add up.
The more important point being that one of my boys finished college and one dropped out and joined the Navy and they’re both doing well, while my stepdaughter managed to get a full ride and she’s good, too.
Today I have three college-aged granddaughters and only one of them tried the “College of Your Choice” gambit and that only for a year.
Gen Z is learning to evaluate things.
Voc-tec, for instance, is an excellent alternative, as are community colleges, as is the GI Bill, as are all sorts of alternatives to four-year college.
I am pleased that administrators no longer seem to brag at high school graduation about the number of kids headed for four-year colleges because I always felt it would have been only fair to disclose how many of the previous class had flamed out and been home again by Thanksgiving.
Not that you shouldn’t go if that’s what you want and need.
But “The College of Your Choice” isn’t necessarily the hardest, most prestigious place you can get into. It should be the place that offers what you want and need.
Impressing your guidance counselor and your parents’ friends needn’t be part of it.
But analyzing as major an investment as college is well beyond most of us.
As Lee Judge (KFS) depicts it, we’re much happier reacting to momentary distractions and personal inconvenience. After a lot of screaming over the price of eggs, that crisis has passed, but we’ve always got gas prices to complain about, even though anyone who has been driving a car for more than a year knows gas prices go up and down often and with little permanent impact.
Dear lord, we’re paying as much now as we were four months ago. Not nearly as much as a year ago, mind you, but we have to have something to complain about.
This’ll do.
There are, however, more substantive problems in the world.
Christian Adams offers a term that is new to me, though perhaps it’s something British folks already use. “Guppies” are more numerous than “Yuppies” and there’s nothing shameful in being priced out of the market, given the state of the market.
I take some grim comfort in knowing that the suffering is not confined to the US of A.
Fact is, it also extends to Australia, where Cathy Wilcox adds the fact of unaffordable rents to the problem of unaffordable ownership.
I don’t have specific numbers to compare, but I do monitor political cartoons from various countries and it’s a much-commented-upon issue in both the UK and Australia.
My suspicion is that it’s not any greater an issue there but that cartoonists are more focused on it, which is a way of pointing out that political cartoons in those other countries seem to have some fearsome and enviable edge.
One of the few times you’ll ever hear Yanks being accused of being too polite, but we do seem to tiptoe around topics that others eagerly charge straight into.
F’rinstance, we have homeless migrants being shipped up from Texas to New York City and winding up homeless there, and Matt Davis points out that, meanwhile, our cities are chockful of empty office buildings.
This should provoke outrage, but we’re polite, so, instead, it provokes head-scratching.
Some of the office buildings are being converted into chi-chi apartments and some “can’t be” which sounds more like whining than analysis. Bottom line is that we have a situation where, whether for migrants or natives or whoever, we can’t manage to rustle up affordable housing.
Maybe it’s not that we can’t rustle up the housing.
Maybe it’s that we can’t rustle up the fury.
Point being, it’s not that Joe Heller is wrong. All these things indeed combine to make housing unaffordable, and as we fight inflation with higher borrowing rates, it does force people who own houses to stay put rather than sell out and move up. Meanwhile, construction costs are, well, through the roof.
But analyzing the issue doesn’t get people off the sidewalks and into housing, and if we persist in thinking of “affordable housing” as housing that people with good jobs can barely squeeze into, we’re leaving out a large segment of the population.
We’re also prolonging, rather than addressing, the issue.
The characters in Cornered (AMS) always seem to be in their mid-40s, but maybe that’s suitable for this gag, because our solution to the housing crisis is a combination of passive acceptance and an assumption that we need to solve the problem for ourselves.
I suppose it’s part of our historical heritage, deriving from Jamestown, where Captain John Smith famously declared “He that will not worke, shall not eate.”
Lovely philosophy, so long as you don’t object to the fact that roughly two-thirds of the Jamestown settlers died.
And as long as you don’t look around and see that nobody else on the globe sticks to that heartless rule, or, at least, nobody admirable.
When the Weavers were accused of being socialists, Pete Seeger would point out that the Indians were socialists, and he was right: If Crazy Horse brought 20 horses back from a raid, he’d distribute them to families that needed them, and when a Lakota family made themselves a new tent covering, their old one would go to someone who whose cover was worn out and inadequate.
Jesus Whatshisface preached the same concept, but Crazy Horse is long dead and nobody listens to Jesus Whatshisface anymore either.
So it goes.
I’ve often marveled at the righteous fury of folks from blue-collar Ireland. They combine well with Woody Guthrie.
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