This....Exactly

Sorry for the feast or famine nature of posting recently (to those who read anyway) and the lack of actual writing in the postings. I was working at the elementary school and busy everywhere else. A three day weekend found me rarely at home.

This article on student debt hits to close to home for me to even write about. If I start it will turn into the kind of downward sucking vortex whose spin science has shown us can not actually grow large enough to hamper a ship. Mine could. My student debt isn't even that high. It is just that unpayable. The frustrating part is that you are not allowed to advance in society until it is. I can't get an assistantship or any other loans for grad-school until my debt is paid, or being paid, the same process really, but I can't get a better job, especially in this economy until I go to grad school, which is pretty much all I have ever wanted to do. The frustrating thing is, and I have a feeling this isn't just me, is that I did nothing irresponsible along the way. I went to school, like we are all supposed to. I went to school, I even tranfserred to a cheaper school fearing the financial implications. I graduated and got a good job on JET. The only real mistake I made was leaving JET but that was for a girl, and when you are 24 you make decisions about girls that you really shouldn't. After that I did okay for money but the economy crashed. I didn't see that as what was happening at the time but reading back now it is clear that Japan went down before America, and Miyazaki went first in Japan. (If you exclude Okinawa, which started from further down and is always kind of down.) When I quit eikaiwa I was lined up for a very good paying job that disappeared due to the economy and I had quit eikaiwa because I wasn't getting paid. Schools in Osaka stopped paying for full time teachers because their city government went in debt. Osaka built the ATC and tried to bid on the Olympics, meanwhile me, and people like me suffer under the yoke of our on seemingly responsible decisions. It is at the point now, and I am sure I am not alone in this, where joining the military seems like the only rational decision and the only way to address debt. Debt that I again emphasize was incurred in trying to make all of the right decisions. Not by spending on credit cards, not in buying cars. Not in building useless skyscrapers or starting senseless wars. I am just part of a group of people who it has been decided are just big enough to allow to fail.

Update

One related thing I forgot to mention is:

This system of debt serves to create a permanent underclass that finds it impossible to move up in society based on their own merit. It means that grad-school and other professions are accessible to people who don't need learns and can have their debts paid for them. Of course, that includes people who worked hard and earned scholarships. But also includes a class of dilettantes who will only reinforce their position. This couples with the current health care disaster to create an underclass and force it down lower and lower and render it permanent.