wandergnome

The value of an education

What do you find most frustrating in the world?

I don’t know about you, but for me it is ignorance. I can’t stand misinformed and uneducated people. I don’t necessarily mean people without a diploma… I mean people who don’t think critically and aren’t curious about the world. I admire people who have done some thinking and some learning and can formulate informed opinions for themselves. 

The greatest gifts that UC Santa Cruz has given me are the tools to learn about something, question it, and then learn about it some more through a 9hopefully0 much clearer lens. I think that if everyone in the country had the vision and the drive to be curious and to learn the facts of the world, we would be much better off and politics wouldn’t be so easily manipulated by the media. 

I think the best way to do this is to educate the masses. Historically, that is exactly what the gentry sought to prevent in order to keep the population oppressed… and that is what we should be fighting. 

And the best way to educate the masses? Make education affordable and available to anyone who wants it. 

Re: The 99%

In terms of Ben, you have to understand that you are facing a huge blind spot. We live in one of the most affluent and beautiful areas of the country… California. It many ways it actually is the dreamland that the movies make it out to be, and yet still we face immense issues of social structure.

Yes, compared to Egypt and almost anywhere else, our streets are paved with gold. But frankly, this is our home country and we don’t want to see anyone living that way, first and foremost our own people. Especially whilst watching the smallest fractions of the population live far above their means while others struggle to feed and house themselves. Yes, maybe it is their fault. But is it their fault if they are less skilled than the wealthy? That their parents didn’t have the money to buy them a degree? It’s not an equal playing field. I’m just saying that it’s not right to be a part of a community and let your fellows suffer. 

I feel immensely blessed to have the opportunity to be here at an excellent university, and certainly without the help of social systems I would not be. I have worked hard for my community, and I feel that I both deserve it and will pay it back. I am not getting a degree so I can flaunt it around; I am getting a degree to get an education, so that I can know the world, and thus, help it. 

Not to be the whining ‘woe is me voice’, but I have been homeless. It sucks. A lot more people than you’d ever expect struggle to survive… There were kids at my school who would show up to the soup kitchen on Sunday mornings with their parent(s). We would awkwardly pretend not to notice each other to save our pride. I remember moving from place to place as a child, sometimes sleeping in the car, other times on random people’s couches. It wasn’t the worst thing, and I am not in any way the worst case scenario. But in the shelters, we met some truly great people whom bad things had simply happened to. The would be single mothers with their children, or those who got sick and their health insurance wasn’t enough. Many had once had houses and careers, but hard times had fallen upon them and the technicalities of the system took all they had worked for away.

I fight to make a more honest and forgiving, even loving system for my community. I don’t want to live in a place where corporations can get rich gambling your hard earned money or where the sick can be left to wither away. We don’t need more growth. We need a better system. One that cares for the people, not the corporations. 

Long have I been uninvolved and frankly, quite ambiguous to the lot. I don’t feel a lot of heat or anger… just sadness, personally. When I discuss the current unrest, I always feel like the moderating voice of reason, who is saying, “Hey, why are we saying ‘fuck the police’? They are a part of us…”. And you know what? People understand. They respond to it.

The only way to be involved is to get involved. Don’t feel like the Occupy movement is something that is so far away and that stands for questionable motives. Occupy is a blanket term for “We don’t like the way things are going”. You find your own meaning (and maybe that meaning is we don’t like the privatization of education). You share it. People understand. There will always be those yelling ‘FUCK THA PIGS!’, but you know what? That’s okay. It’s their perogative, and who am I to tell them that they’re wrong? All I can do is share my views and hope that others will respect them as well. 

If I don’t do something, who will? Who am I to complain about the country if I say nothing about it? I will make my voice heard, and hope to inspire those who feel unsatisfied to do the same. Our government is large and distant, so we join together to raise our voices and make them heard. 

Yes, this is what the seedling of a revolution looks like. We’re not there yet, but at least we are thinking about our community as ours, something that we have power to change and power to criticize, rather than a mandated system which we live within passively.  

I apologize for being cheesy. It is late, I am tired. But I am being honest. Look at Sweden, look at Canada… why can’t we be like that?