New Beginnings

When I created and began writing my first blog, it was about politics with a tendency toward American foreign policy. That was two years ago. I found myself becoming disenfranchised or simply disinterested with politics. I realized that I can like foreign policy without making it what defines me. Since then, it's been a gradual epiphany toward recognizing the value in loving art, history, literary studies, Native America(ns), poetry, anthropology, and generally whatever fancies me. A professor once told me that people who I believe in interdisciplinarity (mind you, I don't know if I am one of those people or I'm just doing what I want because it pleases me and I want to be a well-rounded individual) rarely ever touch the surface of anything or make any significant strides in modes of thinking. I'm not out to make this blog my rebuttal to her myopic statement; I want this newborn thing to be beautiful and for me as well as for other readers.


So here goes:
I'm reading an article by Louis Menand that appeared in The New Yorker last week (this week's issue is the summer fiction issue and it features a story by Lauren Groff who went to UDub-Madison with a friend of mine, Jacques Rancourt. I will link to both of them soon. Here's the link to Menand: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/06/06/110606crat_atlarge_menand) and he's talking about the value of college. He points to the higher income of people with a bachelor's degree: $83,000 versus someone with a high school education, who on average makes $31,000. Menand seems to be making a big leap from the "value" of education to income; though I don't doubt that a college education is beneficial (how can I?), I think I'd rather have little to no debt and make $30,000 than have a quarter of a million dollars (or more! the thought makes me nauseous) and make $80-85,000. Perhaps this is naivete, but the idea of debt makes me incredibly unhappy and I think I'd rather have to worry about living on/with less than worry about vast amounts of debt. It also bothers me than the inflationary status of higher education is normalizing the idea of debt, especially long-term debt. When 22% of awarded degrees are going to business students, the thought of debt seems to parallel the way we treat our environment and economy: it's okay to use up natural resources now, we'll figure it out later; it's okay to speculate on housing and the value of "derivatives" and other forms of non-existent money, we'll figure it out later; it's okay to spend piles of money on my undergraduate degree, I'll pay it back later, it will all work out. That philosophy of "we'll figure it out later" distresses me personally, but it correlates to the way we behave and suggests that we need to start changing the way we think about the "value" of things.