Recently I was skimming through Facebook, like I do. I have a very diverse collection of friends on there. I have crazy Democrat friends, crazy Republican friends, socialist friends, libertarian friends, and many, many apolitical friends.
Anyway, I came across this post making its way around my more left-leaning friends:
I’m not here to make any comments about Ukraine or the impending WWIII. Honestly, my first thought when I saw which of my friends were reposting this was, “Aren’t you the people complaining about student loans?”
Don’t get me wrong, there’s lots of stuff wrong with the student loan situation. I come to this one mostly from the libertarian perspective: If the government were to stop CAUSING problems in higher education, it wouldn’t have to try so hard to solve the problems in higher education. Thomas Sowell and Antony Davies are excellent resources for more details.
But to get back to the quote, just think about that. Think about sitting on a concrete floor in a train terminal, holding your cat, wondering if your home and everyone you love has been blown to bits. Try to think of that as the baseline, what normal life is like.
Maybe have a little gratitude that there is gas available to pump, that you’re driving to work instead of fleeing your home. Have a little gratitude that the higher education was available to you and that you can complain (and be heard complaining) about money instead of crying silently about a loss you can’t recover from.
And for the love of God, enough of the partisanship. You don’t get to whine and complain about your issues if you’re going to try to shame the other side for complaining about theirs.
We need to talk about gas prices and we need to talk about student loans and we need to experiment with solutions and we need to measure the results of the experiments so we can double down when we’re right and *gasp* backtrack when we are wrong. I know that’s a pipe dream, but that’s what we need to do.
Just something I was thinking about.
