Shoot for the Clouds: Paying for College

When we first discussed the implications of poverty, we talked about how people with less money have fewer choices. And as juniors in high school, a large financial decision looms near; which college to go to. When we were younger, our parents always told us we could go anywhere we wanted, Harvard, Yale, wherever, as long as we worked hard enough. But in 11th and 12th grade, reality sets in. Not only is it nearly impossible to be admitted into these top schools, but paying for them is a huge financial burden! And the economic recession has only made paying for schools even more difficult. According to an article I found about the struggles people face when paying for college, "the average graduate owes average graduate owes $21,000, a number experts expect to rise sharply in the next few years. The typical undergrad also carries $2,200 in credit card debt, according to the nation's largest student lender." For years, students have been in enormous debt when they graduate from college, but this situation will, unquestionably, deteriorate on behalf of the current state of the economy. With recourses scarce, families have been forced to cut into college savings and spend them now, whether it be to pay the rent, the mortgage, or for groceries. And furthermore, many families never even had a decent savings account; 65 percent of parents put away less than 5,000 dollars in college savings, and 43 percent of these people had never even started saving for their child's college education. With colleges more reluctant to hand out student loans, banks more hesitant to lend struggling families large sums of money, hard working high school students are being forced to turn down their top college choices, the ones they have worked so hard to be admitted into, and turning to the cheaper, less selective schools.
It seems to me that the economic recession is altering the American Dream. We are now deemed unrealistic when we think that we can go anywhere, do anything, as long as we work hard enough, because there are so many financial obstacles that were either not there before, or that we are simply more wary of. Because our country has suffered tremendously from people getting into too much debt, we must stop thinking so idealistically, believing one day, we will get a job with a better salary that allows us to pay off our debts, and be a little more realistic; we must make the best decisions for the time being, rather than expecting things to always be better in the future. The "American" perspective has always been optimistic, but maybe this optimism has gotten us into trouble, into such debt. Students and their families are being forced to think realistically about their financial future, and are choosing the cheaper college, even if this cheaper school was not that "good school" they had always dreamed of going to. The American Dream for America's students has changed; it is no longer simply a question of how hard did you work? What grades did you get? Now, we must also consider where our parents can afford to send us, rather than deciding to worry about that after we graduate and owe thousands of dollars in student loans. The financial struggles our country is facing have put many American teens and their families in a more down to earth and practical mindset, even if this means, as Kathy Frenzel, a mother preparing to pay for her child's college education, says, telling your kids not to shoot for the moon, but to shoot for the clouds instead.

Immigrants and Job Losses- Are they to blame?

It seems that in the midst of this economic crisis, many other large issues, such as immigration, are being overlooked, when these issues are, in fact, all very connected. As we studied in class, during times of economic downturn, people tend to point at a scapegoat as the cause of job losses. It seems to me that today's main scapegoats are those who handed out and received the AIG bonuses, as they seem to embody the irresponsibility that has plagued our nation's economy. However, I was curious to see what Americans' attitudes are towards immigration, because immigrants have always been an identifiable, vulnerable scapegoat.
When the issue of Mexican immigration arises, many Americans like to point out that these people simply cross the border and take jobs from hardworking and deserving Americans. This is a much debated point; however, I found an article that proves that immigrants coming to the U.S. to work temporarily really are not having a large impact on our economy and causing job losses. According to a report by an American public policy organization, H-1B visa-holders, the temporary work visa, represent a mere seven in 10,000 civilian workers in the U.S. Nonetheless, United States lawmakers are continuing to find ways to put restrictions on the visa, and the Senate "recently cleared a bill that restricts hiring of H1-B visa holders by financial services firm receiving government bailout funds." The report from the NAFP (National Foundation for American Policy) proves that the U.S. "backlash against H-1B visa usage" is unnecessary, and according to an executive at a large Indian IT firm that figured among the top 10 H1B users, "There are over 5 million unemployed people in the US. How can 65,000 H-1B visa holders be held responsible for job losses?"
While these are tough times, and we all want to see hardworking Americans get back on their feet, it's time we stopped pointing fingers. These immigrants, especially the ones with a visa, have done nothing wrong. Like the classic "American Dream," they have come to our country looking to improve their lives, go from rags to riches, or if not riches, at least a decent life for themselves and their families. We live in a culture where it is almost instinctive to want to climb from poverty to privilege, and when we see others, such as immigrants, making their trek more successfully than us, we tend to blame them for our own problems. Americans need to wake up and see that these immigrants are not causing job losses, and, as Duke University professor and Harvard researcher Vivek Wadwa says, "While the xenophobes go on their witch-hunt and blame immigrants for the loss of jobs, the best and the brightest are leaving the US and taking the economic recovery with them." Adopting protectionist policies would deter many foreigners with great potential to help aid this country, and according to the article, Chinese and Indian professors are turning back to their home countries and finding greater opportunities now than ever before. Our economy is a competitive one, especially today. However, as we should have learn from past experiences, scapegoating is rarely the solution to a problem, and by significantly reducing the number of visas our government will grant, which would neither provide significantly more Americans with jobs (because as we saw, the numbers were too low for it to have an impact), and would push away some valuable, even ingenious foreigners, which would be detrimental to our country in the long run.

Reccession Leads to Moderation?

I was listening to the radio the other morning, and the talk show hosts were discussing how the extremely wealthy Americans are trying to be discrete about their wealth these days. When they shop at stores like Chanel, they ask for garbage bags to carry their purchases in so that people don't see that they just spent thousands on, say, designer shoes. Today, being thrifty is in, and spending excessive amounts on designer clothes is seen as greedy and even wasteful. This discussion made me wonder how our economy today has affected our consumer culture. How has this economic downturn affected Americans' attitudes as consumers?
An article in Time Magazine titled "How Consumers Shop Differently Today" details how Americans are shopping more wisely these days, preparing for themselves for the worst case scenario in order to ensure financial security in the future. As writer Sean Gregory explains in the article, "Sure, I can afford the plasma television now, but should I save that $2,000, in case I get laid off tomorrow?" Turbulent financial times inevitably make people more careful with their money. We can only hope that this recession will make people more cautious about spending, but could this caution, this increased reluctance to spend $2,000, make our nation as a whole less greedy? By design, consumer culture trains people to take as much as they can for as little as possible, causing many Americans to have a sort of "Buy, buy, buy" and "Give me more" mentality. However, the acute awareness many are gaining of the importance of saving has taught many to resist those material temptations. As Gregory explains, "There's the fundamental realization that Americans have woken up. Their bellies are too big, their cars are too big, their homes are too big, their debts are too big, and they have to go on some kind of a diet." Essentially, Americans just might be realizing that they do not have to take everything that they can get. Greed is what fundamentally drives consumer culture. Americans have always tried to get the most bang for their buck. That's why Supersizing a meal at McDonalds is so appealing. More food for only a few cents more, why not? Forget about your waistline, a deal's a deal, right? Well, hopefully this recession will make Americans rethink some of their choices and use more caution, whether they're watching their wallets or their weight. Overindulgence has always been acceptable, even encouraged, in this country, until now. We have always tried to buy as much as we possibly can, because in a consumer culture, material goods represent wealth, success, even happiness. But when there is less money around for spending, we are forced to consume in moderation. And the longer America spends in a period of moderation, the spend, spend, spend idea of American culture will decline and become unacceptable, and fewer Americans will live outside their means, and maybe, our society will be less materialistic and greedy.

Hidden Poverty in America

A couple of weeks ago, I saw a commercial on ABC for a Diane Sawyer special called "Children of the Mountains Struggle to Survive," and in the commercial, I saw footage of people living in the Appalachians where conditions seemed almost identical to those of third world countries. When I think of poverty, I usually think of the poor people living in Africa, India, China where it is a struggle to provide multiple meals each day. I never realized that there were people in America living in similar conditions! I did not watch the program, but I read the report on the ABC website. The accounts of the lives of these children were tragic and resonated with our class's description of what characterizes a life of poverty. One of the main reasons these children are in these situations is their parents' addiction to prescription drugs, which makes getting and keeping a job nearly impossible, and without any source of income, the family is virtually stuck. Courtney, a 12-year-old whose mother is now trying to stay away from the drugs says "Honestly, I'd love for me, my mom, Bill and us girls to have our own home," she said. "But we do not have the money to do that. Bill is wanting to get a job, but we can't because we ain't got a car to get him back and forth." Their poverty, in addition to their geographic isolation, has greatly limited their freedom. 18-year-old Jeremy Hackworth dreamed of becoming an engineer in the military. However, after he got his girlfriend pregnant, he felt obliged to work in the mines and provide for his family. Once again, their poverty has limited their freedom and taken away their options.
At New Trier, students thrive on their freedom to choose their life path: most of us have a few colleges to choose from that we can afford to go to, and we have counselors who help us decide what we will major in as we explore career options. Our opportunities are endless, which in many ways is due to our families' wealth, because there is no way that these families living in the Appalachians would, without significant scholarship money, be able to afford a college education for all of their children.
After reading about the lives of these children, I cannot help but wonder why so many people are opposed to socialism. Why not have a system where everyone truly is equal? These kids are at such a huge disadvantage when it is not their fault, it is their parents'! Because our nation's economic system fails to provide the financial assistance that the kids need, they are basically trapped in a life of poverty.

Are We Living in a Post-Racist America?

As we discuss racism, slavery, and what the election of an African American present indicates about the status of racism in our country, I was curious to see some other attitudes towards the issue of race. I found an article written by a man named Dinesh D'Souza, who, in 1995, published a book titled The End of Racism. In his book, D'Souze did not argue that racism did not exist in America, but that it no longer dictated how black people should or had to live their lives. He now argues that Predident Obama was elected because he was "judged not by the color of his skin but by the content of his character." Obama's demeanor and conduct, and the fact that he is not a "race-hustler," is what sets him apart from, say, Jesse Jackson, who tries to turn vicitimization into self-profit. In essense, D'Souza argued that as a whole, America now sees past skin color and makes character judgements rather than racial, and this has allowed African Americans to live their lives as they wish without racial barriers.
With all the hype over how enlightened Americans are, now that we are being lead by a man who would have had to sit in the back of a bus a half a century ago, it seems that we are too caught up in our achievements to focus at another prevalent form of discrimination: that against gay Americans. Is it possible that in fifty years, we could elect a homosexual to be our president? Today, that seems virtually impossible. Just as we denied African Americans basic rights, we are presently denying gay Americans the right to wed. The American Dream consists of marrying the person you love, having a family, and maintaining a job to support that family. We are denying these Americans the right to fulfill the American dream. While gay marriage may seem radical now, electing an African American would have been unthinkable a hundred years ago. It is time that we open our eyes, stop congratulating ourselves on overcoming discrimination based on race, and stop discriminating based on sexuality.

Romanticizing: The U.S. Cellular Commercial with the Smiling Guy on his Cell Phone

This U.S. Cellular commercial really seems to romanticize the power and importance of a phone company. It makes the argument that this cell phone, by connecting you with other people, will spread love and make the world a better place. (The company’s latest slogan is “Believe in something better.” ) While the argument itself is somewhat ridiculous, because don’t all phone companies connect you with other people? the way the commercial makes the argument is over the top. It starts out with a guy receiving a call, which makes him smile. Then, other people see him smiling, and they smile too! And then a poster of a smiling mouth is unrolled down the side of a building, and balloons are released into the air, and clearly the world is a better place because this guy is smiling about a call, right?
This commercial makes a phone something it is not, and could not ever be. It cannot make people happy; it cannot make the world better. Maybe a conversation you have can make you happy, but it’s not your phone company that is making these changes, or releasing balloons. The commercial goes so over the top with the way this guy seems to lift everyone around him’s spirits that it loses its credibility. It also romanticizes the potential a smile has to change its environment. Sure, smiling can be contagious, if someone is smiling at you, but personally, seeing someone talking on their phone and smiling at their own conversation would not make me smile. Maybe this commercial would be more realistic if they had stuck with the idea of connecting people, but by bringing balloons into the picture and arguing they are making the world better, they make the company something that it is not.

School Rivalries and Racism

A few days ago, my brother, a freshman at New Trier, told me an irritating story about something that happened at his basketball game. His team had easily won the game, and as they were shaking hands, a boy on the other team slapped one of our team's player's hands and spat the word "Jew" in an extremely offensive manner. I have lived on the North Shore for my entire life and never before seen any acts, nor have I heard any comments, that seem racist, anti-Semitic, etc. But it seems to me that school rivalries bring out the worst in everyone. At the New Trier- Evanston games, kids in the New Trier section shout out rude things to the players on the other teams, things they would never say if they were to see the players on the street.
While school rivalries are meant to be fun, the things some students do remind me in many ways of America in the 1800s. Similar to how difference in skin color empowered whites over blacks and made it ok to enslave them, and after slavery was abolished, segregate and oppress them, is the fact that because two students attend different schools, they each have the right to hate the other and have justification for inflicting violence on the other. There have been countless reports of violence, even shootings, at basketball games between rival schools in Chicago. When people find a difference between themselves and another set of people, they use this previously insignificant difference as rationale for why they are better, why it is ok not to treat the others equally.
In Huck Finn, during Colonel Sherburn's speech to the mob that wants to lynch him, he says "The pitifulest thing out is a mob; that's what an army is – a mob; they don't fight with courage that's born in them, but with courage that's borrowed from their mass, and from their officers" (Twain 147). Like the townspeople would not have had the guts to lynch, or simply harm Sherburn by themselves, students get the courage to shout rude things and to start fights at games from the being in the company of kids from their school; that is where they get that strength, but as Sherburn says, it's not real, it is borrowed. Unfortunately, this borrowed power gives some students a false sense of power and a reason to act violently towards 'rivals.'
I'm not saying that we should stop having rivals; I just think that maybe we should take them less seriously and show the other schools some respect, because really, kids at Evanston and Loyola are no different from us.