| Some of the following experiences I've talked about in bits and pieces, but I want here to show their full, f*ed up glory.
When Chris and I first started dating, I'd had to drop out of grad school because my credit had been destroyed by student borrowing. For reasons not germane to this discussion, I couldn't get a cosigner for further student loans after finishing my BA, though my grandmother kindly helped me out during the last semester of my undergraduate studies.
I tried to make it in graduate school on my research assistant stipend, which came with a tuition waiver, but it was neither enough to pay the bills every month nor did the work leave me enough time to get another job. I then got a very bad upper respiratory infection, which I fortunately had student health care to treat, was laid up for a couple weeks and ultimately couldn't continue studying at a prestigious university I'd gotten a full scholarship to attend.
For the first months of 2008, I'd been buying cream when I went to the grocery store to add to coffee or juice in hopes that the high fat content would keep me from wanting a third daily meal. It often worked, but then, it wasn't like I could afford to go out enough to really work up an appetite.
I sent out resumes to everyone I could think of and finally secured a couple part time contract jobs that kept me having to borrow rent money from any more of my friends.
It wasn't always like this. Back in 1999, with only a high school diploma, I had worked my way up from sandwich shops to a secretarial job at a nice company with good benefits. Some of those benefits included worker training, and taking advantage of that, I was able to secure a job in web development back when it was an employee's job market. I started making very respectable scratch and this continued until 2001 when the dotcom bubble burst for my very own company and I got laid off.
I made less, but decent money, as a consultant in the years following. Though it was obvious that I'd be treading water forever without a degree and the benefit of good personal connections, so I went to college to better myself. In many ways, though not all, this was a big mistake.
When I dropped the consulting to focus full time on my studies, I became deeply in debt for the first time in my life. But, and this is key, as recently as 2004 I was making enough money that even my very large debts amounted to less than three years worth of my then salary and therefore didn't seem like an insurmountable obstacle.
How stupid I was. I really enjoyed my studies and had great professors, but got no return on my investment. Since graduating college, I have yet to make, with benefits calculated in, more at any job than I was making in 1999. My degree overqualifies me for the jobs I had ten years ago, and the process of getting it kept me from staying up to date with most of the work I had after that.
My current salary barely keeps up with the interest payments on my debt. I try not to think about it too much and I'm really good at keeping up appearances, but I have no idea how to get out from under it.
I told Chris several times when we were talking about getting married, and later when we were engaged, that marrying me would ruin his credit and was a terrible economic decision. I'm lucky that he's a better person than that FreeCreditReportDotCom dude in the commercials, and he's lucky that he wasn't in the same boat that I and so many others are, but it was only the truth.
It's deeply embarassing to me, humiliating and outright frightening, to be a drag on our finances like this. My mother was a widow at around this age and I've already been divorced. I'm happy in what I have in my life now and have gone all in without reservation, but as Amanda Marcotte once observed, there's no way to guarantee security in marriage without committing a human rights violation. There should no more be compulsion in love than in faith. And the world isn't predictable. And people change. And I'd be an even bigger fool than I clearly am if I didn't remember those things even when I have it good.
No one wants to talk about this stuff because it's scary and awful. It casts an unwelcome shadow on what other happiness one manages to secure, gets in the way of pretending that everything is fine so that we can put our best foot forward when searching for new opportunities. Dwell here too much and it's a recipe for winding up calling a suicide hotline in the middle of the night.
Though this is the truth that a lot of people are living, even some who went to college out of high school and then went to work.
We did everything they said we were supposed to and there's nothing to show for it, whether we lost our houses in the meltdown or never could afford one to lose. How can we give our children the advantages our parents gave us? I would be ashamed not to feed a child as well as my high school graduate parents fed me. If I'm lucky enough to be a parent though, being already 34, the first few years of any child's life would be lived in a household that was under water for tens of thousands of dollars in debt and I can do absolutely nothing right now to change that.
In an economy like this, there are going to be many, many people for whom waiting to become parents until their finances straighten out would mean never getting to be parents. And that's frankly a cruel thing to deny to people who want it. Don't even start with the 'responsibility' talk, I'll have none of it. I believe as strongly in the right to be a parent as I do in the right not to be.
What have the Democrats done to help me and the others in my situation? Nothing. I can't even see that they're planning to do so.
Key banking committee Democrats are as high as a Republican at a hooker's house on Sallie Mae contributions. You know what Sallie Mae is to me? The debtor so stingy they don't send out return envelopes with their bills. Even the Citibank people aren't that f*ing cheap, but then, they're charging me loan shark interest rates; if they weren't sending out envelopes I might just be forced to blow a gasket.
Chris tells me that I shouldn't judge myself by my bank balance. I know he's right. I even know that if I judged others that way I'd (be right to) feel like a total schmuck. But I'm a product of my times and I spent a lot of years marinating in a culture that judges people by their bank balances, so that stuff lives in my head and it resists exile.
So yeah, I know the FRC doesn't care whether my life gets better. I know their diagnosis of root causes probably includes feminists, queers, immigrants, college professors, non-Christians, 'bad' Christians, the non-abstinent, disobedient children, and all other deviants from their petty vision of a world ruled by straight, white, Christian males from Real America. In short, they hate me and all my friends. I know they're apologists for the corporate aristocracy and that all their economic prescriptions would only further the kleptocratic nature of our society.
But what the hell are the Democrats countering with? What are they doing that someone in my situation who paid less rabid attention to politics would even notice? Nothing much I've seen.
The stimulus did some good, but was too small to even stop the bleeding and there's little stomach for another go. The credit card lenders, payday lenders, mortgage lenders and all the rest of the thieves are doing well. Youth unemployment is ludicrous, which means the Gen Y folks that come after us grumbling Xers are likely to find a decade from now that they, too, will have nothing to show for themselves but sparkling wits and bitter, bitter experience.
Maybe by then, Democrats will have learned more than Tony Perkins and decide to give sh*t. I'm not holding my breath. Though they should consider that they're working on creating a whole country full of people with nothing to lose, and they might want to consider whether that's likely to work out well for anyone in power. |
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