The future of America

Again, we're back to the "we are the future" claims from today's youth...and I fear for my country if it's really so.

Today's example: Molly Katchpole, a girl living in Washington DC who used student loans to get as useless degree and who now wonders why she can't find work and frets that she has to actually pay that money back with interest.

Starting in December, the art and architectural history major has to figure out a way to start paying off her student loans, which she says will require payments of at least $200 a month.

“I don’t know what I am going to do!” said Katchpole, a freelance account manager at a political consulting firm called Winning Over Washington. (Its main client is the progressive group MoveOn.org.) “I am going to have to defer my loans. I have no idea. Why should I be expected to pay them off now? Why are colleges charging interest on that stuff? Give us a break. Really.”

I guess the whole concept of a loan went right over her head when she was filling out all of those application forms. But t be fair, maybe lenders should stop loaning out money for degrees like "art and architectural history", "philosophy", "ethnic culture" or "women's studies". Maybe if lenders weren't throwing money out to pay for degrees that will never put anyone into a real job with a salary that allows them to repay it, loans would be cheaper for serious students and colleges would not offer so many classes taught by useless but highly-paid "academics" who really do nothing but indoctrinate students into stupid ways of thinking. Case in point: Here's Molly. Her dad, Jim Katchpole, is a machinist and her mother, Kathy Katchpole, is a physical therapist’s assistant. So she apparently came from decent stock. Yet after a few years in college, she now sits around in a basement apartment with some shack-up guy, "surrounded by labor history and anarchy books" and is apparently only considering employment with left-wing "social change" groups. And she seems to honestly believe that she should not have to pay the loans that financed her tuition and paid her rent and grocery bills during those years she spent goofing around at school, at least not if it means forsaking her dream of working for SEIU or Planned Parenthood and having to get a real job. But even SEIU doesn't want a no-talent-having, non-skilled drone on their payroll...and that says a lot for a union that makes it's money organizing and representing no-talent-having, non-skilled drones.

Now if Molly were some sort of aberration, that might be ok. We could shrug her off as an example of social darwinism in action and leave her to a future that consists mainly of working in some food co-op or thrift store and going home at night to an apartment full of cats. But there are a lot of other Mollys out there today (see "Occupy Wall Street") and most of them expect that they should be forgiven their debts, given free houses just because they want them, and otherwise coddled by a society that takes the money required to support them all from you and I, by force if necessary. One of the biggest problems today is that we've raised a generation of Free Riders and given each one the power of the vote, allowing them to choose a government model which will perpetuate and support their own willful dependency while sticking the rest of us with the bill. So where does it stop? Do we become Italy or Greece? Or do the Productive Ones all walk off one day ala Ayn Rand and just let the Mollys all fend for themselves for a winter or two, after which, there'll likely be precious few Mollys left because that kind lacks the skills and the motivation to survive on their own.

And what happened in America that we went from being a nation of achievers, a country run by the people who built bridges, skyscrapers and transnational businesses, to a nation of Mollys who sit around with their mouths open and their hands out, demanding that you and I just pay all of their bills? Frankly, I doubt that the men and women who made America into the only real world power in the 1950's and 60's would have tolerated all of these OWS brats that infest many of our cities today. I'm thinking that they or the police would have been in there with sticks and hoses and even buckets of soap, wire brushes and shears, and every single dirty hippie that they could catch would leave clean and groomed with instructions to have a job by the end of the week or else. They damned sure wouldn't have offered them all free rides at the college of their choice for as many years as it takes to get a degree in a field that's not hiring or doesn't even exist, the way that we do today.

Maybe we need to return to those good old days, those "pre-Molly" days. And if Molly and her peers don't want to apply themselves and become doctors and engineers, they can pick fruit or process fish or ride on the back of a garbage truck if they have to, because the rest of us shouldn't have to pay their bills or ignore their debts until they land their non-existent dream jobs.