Copyright © 2011 by P. A. Ritzer
15 November 2011
Instead of the government-student-loan approach to college financing, I propose the Knute Rockne approach, dramatized in the 1940 film Knute Rockne: All American, in which, fittingly, Ronald Reagan became the Gipper.
Rockne wanted to study at the University of Notre Dame. So, in order to do so, he worked four years at the Chicago Post Office and saved his money. And he continued working. Besides climbing up from a scrub to captain of the football team, he graduated magna cum laude and was offered a job at Notre Dame as a graduate assistant in chemistry. He accepted, as long as he could also help coach the football team. From 1918, when he took over as head coach, he compiled a record of 105 wins, 12 losses, 5 ties, 6 national championships, an .881 winning percentage, highest ever in college or professional football, before he died in an airplane crash at the age of 43. He once said: “The best thing I ever learned in life was that things have to be worked for” (www.knuterockne.com).
On the other hand, today we hear of “jobs Americans won’t do.” What! Jobs Americans won’t do! Since when? Since they could rack up tens to hundreds of thousand of dollars in government-backed or -provided student loans while immersed in youthful ignorance that does not appreciate the trap it sets until they are caught in it, or liberal arrogance that does not care who picks up the tab for their indulgence. And since, in 2009, President Obama and the Democrats engineered a federal take-over of the student-loan business, the president now claims the right to slash the amounts students will have to pay back to the taxpayers. Here’s one more tool liberals can use to turn Americans into effete, dependent, disgruntled, thoughtless voting machines ever ready to pull the lever for the liberals who will do their best to keep them that way.
I think of some of the jobs I had from the age of ten or so that helped pay my way through college and keep the student-loan monster from growing out of control: pulling weeds, delivering papers and collecting payment, mowing lawns, sweeping floors, cleaning bathrooms, installing drain tile, flipping burgers, painting, hanging sheetrock, laying concrete block, striking joints between bricks, and just plain hauling by hand: brick, mortar, block, sheetrock, shingles, plywood, beds, windows, you name it. And most of my friends and family worked similar kinds of jobs.
And from that background I look with disgust upon the display of covetous malcontents–the Occupy Here, There, and Everywhere set–squatting on Wall Street and other public and private properties across the nation. And here is where the sluggish old gray matter churns up a solution. I will run the risk of assuming that these Occupy folks are Americans. And I can think of nothing that would better cure their ills than work.
Sooooo–I know you’re way ahead of me here–take away the student loans, (and dismantle other liberal devices, like the minimum wage, designed to protect a self-serving elite and limit the number of people who can find work) and suddenly we would have a vast number of people who would have an incentive to do the jobs Americans hitherto would not do! Think of the advantages. Instead of the spoiled Occupiers content to wallow in the filth and stench of their own sloth and discontent, we could have industrious citizens energized to wash off the dirt and smell earned from a day of honest hard work. Most would strive for something better and leave the entry-level work for the young workers who would follow in their footsteps. And their hard work at entry-level jobs would give more of a value to the reasonably priced education no longer artificially inflated by government student loans.
And having worked for their money, these young people would likely take a more mature and responsible approach to how much they would be willing to spend on their education and what they would expect to receive for their expenditures. Consequently, they would in all likelihood be less willing to spend what they had earned on much of the nonsense now taught at institutions of higher learning, and for that matter, would be more likely to identify the nonsense for what it is. This would help bring down college costs even more. And with a mature, responsible student population better able to identify and less likely to abide nonsense, liberalism and its attendant political correctness would naturally waste and slink away, and institutions of higher learning could once again freely and honestly search for and explore knowledge and truth as in days gone by.
But what if some natural genius of humble means cannot earn enough to attend Ivy League U? Well, he could apply his genius to studies at Local U and perhaps help raise the standing of that institution–rather than sacrifice himself to the liberal god of the status quo–and leave Local U a better place for those who would follow in his path.
Where does illegal immigration fit in? Bear with me.
(to be continued in Part Three)
Revisiting Dr. Seuss In Parenthood (Part One)
5 January 2012
The following commentary first appeared in Saint Austin Review, July/August 2005. It appears here with some revisions. Quotations in quotation marks and block quotes are from the works being considered.
In this election year, we might give special attention to the case of Yertle the Turtle and consider well the growing weight of government and taxation, especially considering the founders’ conviction that it must be a limited government–as established with the Constitution, “deriving [its] just powers from the consent of the governed” (as the Declaration of Independence would have it)–that best secures the “unalienable rights” with which our Creator has endowed us.
Copyright © 2003 by P. A. Ritzer
I remember my brother saying, years ago, that he looked forward to having children of his own, so that he could again watch old Disney movies. I, for my part, in my parenthood, have discovered the joy of revisiting Dr. Seuss and sharing his works, his stories, his words with my children.
This is not my first revisiting. The birth of my nephew and godson in 1990 opened the door for the first revisiting, which went so far as to include sharing with him and his parents a breakfast of green eggs and ham. It was during this first re-acquaintance that I remember declaring that Dr. Seuss was the Shakespeare for children. This declaration, besides being inspired by an adult appreciation for the genius of these works that I had so enjoyed as a child, may also have been an enlightened response to a long-remembered concern, voiced by my parents, and possibly initiated by my teacher, that at second, third, or fourth grade (some grade that was still on the first floor of Sacred Hearts School), perhaps I was too old to be reading Dr. Seuss. My youthful appreciation for these works has since been further vindicated, at least in my eyes, by the discovery that these classics were prescribed for my wife, long before she met me, to alleviate the stress of medical school exams, by a good friend and classmate, with whom she read the works in a stairwell amidst their echoing laughter. The prescriber is now a psychiatrist for both children and adults.
I offer no blanket endorsement or recommendation of the thought and works of Theodor Seuss Geisel. I do not know his thought and have not read all his works, nor have I revisited all his works which I read as a boy. But rather, what I wish to do is to share, as an adult and parent who struggles to live a Christian life in our modern world, an appreciation for the values expressed in at least some of the words, stories, and works of Dr. Seuss.
Certainly, in Green Eggs and Ham the reader is taught a lesson about deciding to dislike foods before one tries them, but does not the persistent Sam eventually wear down the nameless green-eggs-and-ham-hater’s pride- and ignorance-based prejudice, so that he might lead a fuller life with his discovery: “’Say! I like green eggs and ham! I do! I like them, Sam-I-am!’” Thus, the changed fellow can come to the grateful conclusion: “’I do so like green eggs and ham! Thank you! Thank you, Sam-I-am!’”
And, in our culture in which the words nip, tuck, and augmentation have become commonplace, might not the young reader benefit from considering the case of Gertrude McFuzz, a “girl-bird” who “had the smallest plain tail ever was. One droopy-droop feather. That’s all that she had. And, oh! That one feather made Gertrude so sad,” when she compared herself to “a fancy young birdie named Lolla-Lee-Lou,” who “instead of one feather behind, she had two!” This state of affairs leads a jealous Gertrude to one day shout in anger, “‘This just isn’t fair! I have one! She has two! I MUST have a tail just like Lolla-Lee-Lou!'”
Despite the admonition of her wise uncle Doctor Dake, who assures her, “’Your tail is just right for your kind of a bird,’” she throws tantrums, until he tells her of the pills of the pill-berry vine, which will make her tail grow. And although one pill gives her tail another feather, “exactly like Lolla-Lee-Lou,” she decides to “grow a tail better than Lolla-Lee-Lou.” And she does, by gobbling all the pill-berries down. She grows a tail so stupendous that “that bird couldn’t fly! Couldn’t run! Couldn’t walk!”
It takes her uncle and his assistants two weeks to fly Gertrude home. And Dr. Seuss relates:
And how much smarter or wiser might the young reader be after considering the case of Yertle the Turtle, king of the Pond on the Isle of Sala-ma-Sond, where “the turtles had everything turtles might need. And they were all happy. Quite happy indeed.”
So, Yertle begins to build a higher throne on the backs of his subjects, by commanding the turtles to stack themselves up, one on top of the other, beneath him, so that Yertle can see more and exclaim: “’I’m Yertle the Turtle! Oh, marvelous me! For I am the ruler of all that I see!’”
But the burden on the common folks grows to be too much to bear, so that “from below in the great heavy stack, [comes] a groan from that plain little turtle named Mack,” who petitions the king from his distress at the bottom of the stack, “’I know, up on top you are seeing great sights, But down at the bottom we, too, should have rights.’”
By now, though, the power-drunk Yertle has lost all sense of proportion, and after silencing Mack, he begins to call for more turtles that he might build his throne higher than the moon, when:
And from that throne, shaken by the common movement of the lowest subject upon which his corrupt foundation of exploitation is built, falls the mighty Yertle, “that Marvelous he,” into the depths of the mud. And “that was the end of the Turtle King’s rule!” The tyrant is thus deposed, “And the turtles, of course . . . all the turtles are free As turtles and, maybe, all creatures should be.”
(to be continued in Part Two)