Syndicate and Hague

I’ve been feeling disheartened lately. In the news and in life, it seems that online learning has become the mythical goose who laid the golden eggs in the eyes of a funding-starved public higher education system.

You remember what they did to the goose, right? And how that turned out?

One of the reasons I went back to school to get my PhD is because I very uncynically believe that education is transformational on many levels. I decided that if I cared at all about our students and the future of higher ed as we incorporate and rely on technology more, I had to gather the expertise and research experience to gain a voice in the discussion.

I love technology and the ways it provides us to collaborate and talk and experience life in ways that we may not otherwise be able to; I love teaching and being there with my students as they work through difficult issues or texts or problems with their writing; and I truly believe we owe it to all the people in the state to provide students with an exceptional education.

All of this being said, I am old enough and have been around enough work environments that I am cautious in my optimism and hope. It’s an experience that I don’t think people who go straight through school get - the experience of getting your hope and optimism beaten out of you and having to rediscover the source of it in yourself and know that everything is cyclical, everything is tidal, and you can create change by finding new pathways for the change you want to create.

A writer on a political blog I have an affinity for is leaving today for a new job at a different blog, where I assume he will continue to be astute and funny and asinine in no particular order. And he said on his departing post:

If I was “cynical,” meaning, if I didn’t believe that government was important or capable of or needing to play a critical role in American life, I wouldn’t be able to type this blog all day. Who would ever want to read and write about apocalyptic, depressing horror tales hour after hour for years if they thought things didn’t matter, or that they didn’t *have* to be better?

This is the kind of thinking I return to in trying times. It is a kind of personal masochism to get so distressed over something you literally have no control over, but all of this matters. In the blog’s case, it’s about politics; in my case, it’s about education. Even though sometimes I feel like I come from a different planet, I’m not going to stop making the case that the students and their learning experiences are not to be ignored and that we focus only on revenue generation at our peril.

Online education isn’t a gold-filled goose. It’s just a bird.

Stop sending me special offers.  Stop sending me those damned “checks” to use.  Just stop it.

I just spent 45 minutes ripping up your mail - and why did I have to be so careful?  Because you, Citibank, have to put my full name and address in about 10 different places in the mailings.  Because you, Capital One, insist on sending me checks that some random person could just write up and charge the hell out of my account.  Because every time I buy a shredder it breaks within a month and so I’ve given up and taken to tearing up the bits of paper with my hands because, despite the fears over identity theft online, it’s your own recycling/garbage that poses the biggest danger.

Every week, I get five (or so) new offers for cards or “special” offers from my current company offering me the opportunity to spend money I don’t have on impulsive crap I don’t need.

I hate you.  You are exploitative and predatory and suck in the needy and greedy, preying on people’s desires and desperation.  You are plunderers, pushing consumption as the norm and portraying yourselves as our security nets when we’re in need.  Of course, anyone who carries a balance with you could see the ground shift beneath their feet in a moment if you decide to arbitrarily increase rates or change fees or alter minimum payments.

Your leaders make out like the bandits they are - even when your companies fail, they land safely in their multimillion dollar Central Park apartments with their golden parachutes.  They make more from their failures than most of us will accumulate in our entire lifetimes.

Stop sending me mail.  Stop trying to convince me that impulsive/compulsive buying is acceptable.  You can try to blame individuals for making bad decisions and getting into trouble, but the fact is that you and the legislators who allow you to ravage all of us have created the culture in which you are a solution for our crises; orchestrated the financial collapse that hasn’t affected you at all; and systematized your consolidation of power - of rate adjustments and fees and whatnot - while we have nothing.

You totally and completely suck.

Also, I will never carry a balance with you.  Never.

Also, also: stop sending me mail.

I wanted to open this by saying that there are so many things I don’t understand about the people crying “socialism” in regards to having public health care, but that isn’t entirely true. I intellectually understand a lot of the factors leading them to that reaction. Some of it is simply that they have good insurance through their employers and don’t want to possibly wait another day to get seen by a doctor so that we can all be covered. It’s a naive way to think in this economy when a person could lose his/her job and be without insurance or with insurance at staggering COBRA premiums.

I could go into the racial undertones of the anti-health care reform language (directed both at Obama, and at the “others” who may take away “our” health insurance/doctors), but what I want to focus on is why public health care is good for entrepreneurs - and, by extension, for capitalism.

If our leaders are really concerned with the needs of small businesses and individual start-ups of new businesses as they say they are, their resistance to publicly run health care is puzzling. Needing to maintain a relationship with a specific employer in order to have health insurance actually deters people from striking out on their own and becoming innovators.

I could write up some scenarios for you, but you should already know them. Someone with a child with chronic health conditions cannot stop working at a job with great benefits just because they “have a great idea for a business” because no individual plan would provide the level of care the group employee plan does (nor would the individual plan probably cover the child, what with the child’s pre-existing conditions and all).

You could have Crone’s, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, cancer, severe mental illness, whatever - and you are either lucky enough to be trapped with an employer who offers benefits that keep your illness from driving you into bankruptcy, or you get sick. And sickness can be disastrous.

So what are you going to do? Forget yourself, even - if you have people relying on you who absolutely need good medical care are you going to strike out on your own with that new business idea or are you going to stay at your job (hoping benefits don’t get cut more, hoping you don’t get laid off)? In my experience, people with great ideas stay at their jobs because when faced with the kinds of medical bills they would be paying without it, they simply can’t do anything else.

If you’re a capitalist who thinks big business is the only way to go, then this is a pretty good set up. However, no politician likes to go on about how much they looove big business. They’re always talking about “the little guy.” American ingenuity and exceptionalism blah blah blah. But they don’t really mean it. Our fates are tied to the whims of behemoths. Social programs support us so that we have a safety net. As anyone who has ever gone from a dangerous situation to a safe one knows, safety brings freedom. When you’re not in reactive mode, you can plan and dream and innovate.

It’s hard for me to untangle this argument from morality though. At its root, I think it’s immoral for us as a society to not leverage our power as a community to support and buffer each other so that we can all do better.

(A side note to the “SOCIALIST/COMMUNIST” screamers: please read Marx. It is so embarrassing when you use the term “socialist/communist” in place of “i don’t even want to hear what you say” because, due to the context in which you are using it, it is plain that you don’t actually have full knowledge of the tenets of that philosophy.)

Two things happened this week.  First, we now own a house.  Second, we had the wedding reception. That one followed the day after the other was a fluke.

I’ve hesitated to write anything in detail about our experience in buying the house this summer because I was unsure if anything I said would come back to hurt us before it was all over.  But now it’s over.

We bought a short sale from a nice guy who had a whole hell of a lot of bad luck.  I know we live in America and all - currently the land of “I’ve got mine and if you don’t then there must be something wrong about you” - but there hasn’t been a day when my excitement and joy about this beautiful house that we now own hasn’t been tempered with a sadness and resignation about the only way we could afford something like this.  And that is by someone else being in desperate circumstances.

When I’ve told people that, they tend to become remarkably uncomfortable.  They usually try to justify the whole exchange as simply financial and amoral, but there is a large part of me that fully believes the amount of pain M & I have suffered this summer in our transience has been some sort of penance for the way we’ve come to own such a special place.

To buy a short sale, a house that is still owned by the person who is losing it, you must have an element of vulture to you.  The ability to rationalize that their loss is inevitable and it may as well be  you who gains.  And I suppose that is good enough for many people, and, despite rationalizing in that way myself, the guilt of it would overtake me at times.

I’ve seen the destruction left in the wake of other houses people were financially forced to vacate: the appliances pulled from the walls, glass doorknobs stripped and sold along with any other valuables that could be harvested from the house.  Those houses are filled with anger and despair.  You can feel it when you walk in.

When we came to see the place that is now our home, it was a last minute thing and the owner was here.  The moment I stepped into the house, I was blown away by the feel of it and how beautiful it is.  We talked with the owner for a while afterward on the porch and decided to come back the next day and look at it in the daylight.  We were smitten with the house, and he made it clear that he wanted us to have it.  I think what he recognized in us was that, despite our status as vultures, we saw the same kind of beauty in the house.  We weren’t going to tear it apart; we weren’t going to flip it.

For months, we waited.  We moved.  We lost the futon to mold, we lost the sofa, area rug, and chair to moths in the storage space.  We moved four times by the end of the summer, living out of suitcases and hardly anything to cook with or eat on.  I reminded myself constantly that our homelessness was - to an extent - of our own making. It was a waiting game.  Would the house win? Or would we give it up and move to an apartment and call it quits?

Obviously the house won.  But not until we gave up and decided to abandon it, only to be talked back into trying a new loan.

This weekend, the former owner of the house routed an email through his realtor to our realtor to us.  He said that leaving this house was the hardest thing he’s ever had to do, but that he’s glad that we’re the ones who got it.  He told us the history of the house, of its former owners before him, of the things he’d done to the house to make it look the way it should (things that I had assumed were original to the house).  Though some people may find the email guilt-inducing (being reminded of the kind of work and care poured into this place), I found it a relief.  I cannot forget how I’ve profited on someone else’s misery - and despite people wanting to make me feel better about it, I don’t think I should forget it - but having that person feel that their love of a place wasn’t in vain, that he trusts us to do right by the house means a lot to me.

My father likes to tease me and is currently saying that nothing makes you a capitalist like becoming a homeowner, but I think he’s wrong.  I think the loss of community identity is tied to a feeling of entitlement.  If you continually question that entitlement, if you dig down and look at the privilege you have and what the effects of your choices are, then the often-repeated triteness that we become more conservative as we age doesn’t have to become true.

And to the former owner: Thank you for giving us so much in this house.  I know the house itself wasn’t voluntary, but everything you carefully added to the house over the years was your choice to leave and I recognize that as a gift.