student poverty is no joke
Homeless at NYU The American college education system is so totally screwed. I feel for this guy... I knew someone who was living in a music practice room at my old school, because rental costs were so high in the San Francisco area.
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oh, but my dear, hopeful friend, if we make EDUCATION cheap (dare we even make it FREE) then sooner or later the poor souls will start to realize things...things about their country, things about us -- the people in power -- things about this wide world of ours, and then they'll turn their backs on us in the poles in flocks.
so instead, let's fill their ears with the sweet honey of transcendence, fixing for them their own void gazes upon the heavens (it will only cost hundreds of billions of dollars)...
http://www.floridatoday.com/news/space/stories/2004a/spacestoryN0427COSTMYTH.htm
...and wrench their prying eyes away from the vicissitudes of this mortal coil: crime, poverty, hunger, social injustice, etc., etc.
for THEY, after we grant them the fleeting, immaterial freedoms and rebellions of their youth (a protest song, sung out of tune?), THEY soon WILL PASS FROM THIS WORLD.
and it will be as if they were never known, even to their own friends, who will scarcely have time to note the loss, let alone mourn it. this of course, justifying for us, in our own minds, why we are obliged to never CARE one iota. why should we educate a nation of ghosts for for that matter? they are already become like unto phantoms, these 'denizens practice rooms' and so much the better! would they but do us the favor of going just a little further, and dying there; we indeed wish their songs to be INTERRED with their bones.
for then will come one day the final moment, when, at last, their voices will only manifest in the eerie phantom WAILS -- growing ever fainter -- that echo off the walls of that dark, slowly shrinking, even now far too constrictive sepulcher: the once golden heart of mankind
Posted by: r. | April 28, 2004 12:05 AM