Like Mexico

When folks ask me, "what kind of nation do the Republicans want us to be?", I point towards the Mexican border. You have the places like Acapulco where the rich and wealthy play in fabulously expensive resorts. The workers in those resorts are paid a pittance and go home to one-room dirt-floored tar-paper hovels with no electricity or running water. That is the Republican vision of the future of America -- an America with winners and losers, where the winners are filthy, filthy rich and the losers... meh. Losers.

I live down the road from Shallow Alto oops Palo Alto, where Stanford University is located. The upper-middle-class parents who live there know this future in their bones. Children there are under tremendous pressure from an early age to excel academically, play the "right" sports, do the "right" extracurriculars, that will get them into the "right" college. Some of them crack and commit suicide under the pressure -- Palo Alto has more kids committing suicide than any other community its size that I've ever heard of -- but most of them buckle down and obediently put nose to grindstone. Palo Alto has been rocked by cheating scandals also, because if it is a choice between being that peasant in the one-room dirt-floored hovel and a winner, anything is justifiable, including cheating or in some cases false accusation thereof. And while pretty much every student in Palo Alto will graduate and qualify for a decent four-year college, going to San Jose State is not good enough. You have to be accepted by the "right" institution, the institution that is number one in the field you're going into, because as the cabbies with four-year degrees will tell you having a degree nowdays isn't good enough to ensure you become one of the winners. It has to be the "right" degree.

The sad thing is that it doesn't have to be that way. There is no fundamental law of nature that says that America must invariably slide into being just another third world nation with super-rich rich and super-poor poor and nobody inbetween. There is not a scientific law that says that a poor kid cannot graduate from a middle-tier state university in a poor state and become a well-paid engineer with a six figure salary. Indeed, for a brief moment in the late 60's and 1970's it seemed that real progress was going to be made in insuring that all Americans, regardless of whether they were lucky enough to have upper-middle-class parents in Palo Alto, would have a chance to maximize the talents with which they were born. I know. I am one of the last generation of poor kids who had the total cost of his college tuition and textbooks paid for via federal grants. So where I once would have been just another construction worker adding no more value than a nailed 2x4, nowdays folks appreciate my talents enough to pay big money for it. As one of my bosses told me, "you are critical to the success of this company and the new product we are developing and we are going to pay you accordingly" (leaving unstated the "so you don't leave" bit :-).

Thing is, that's not true in America anymore. The elite figured out that they could get their technology workers cheaper by importing them from India and the rest of the world, and now poor kids can't go to college without running up gigantic debts which are not dischargable via bankruptcy if the kid can't pay it back. Who's going to go to college with that kind of burden hanging over them, unless they have a near-guarantee of a job at the end? Thus the emphasis upon the "right" college, the one whose entire graduating class of MBA's or whatever gets jobs on Wall Street or wherever. Meanwhile, millions of American kids with smarts and talent are saying "Will there be fries with that order, sir?" because they can't justify the risks of taking on enormous debt for an education when few recruiters visit the colleges that they can afford to attend, generally low-ranked state colleges. It's a tragic waste, and one that's not necessary. I know it's not necessary, because I was one of those kids, in a kinder gentler America that did not have the edge of cruelty and sadomasochism that today's America has, and America has more than made back the money it invested in my education, hell I pay more taxes in one single year than every dollar that America invested in my education, something that wouldn't be true if I were working multiple part-time odd jobs like most poor kids today have to do to keep body and soul together. But Mexico keeps sliding northward, and most Americans, it seems, have forgotten that it doesn't have to be that way -- and once wasn't.

-- Badtux the Social Observer Penguin