Global Comment

Where the world thinks out loud

#WednesdayWisdom: Alternative solutions for paying off student debt

protesters holding up signs about student debt

As if it’s not bad enough that Elizabeth Warren is a woman running for president, she has now decided to solve the nation’s student debt crisis. What a bitch.

First of all, those students should’ve thought about it before being born into the wrong families, writing useless dissertations on avocado toast, not being willing to sell their kidneys to enterprising Chinese businessmen in exchange for tuition money, and otherwise thinking they’re entitled to an education and a career and possibly even a decent standard of living. Fucking ingrates.

Everyone knows that the American way involves being treated like a serf via usurious debt schemes, lack of consumer protections, and sneering contempt from smug pillar-of-society types and everyone who wishes they were a smug pillar-of-society type.

But more importantly, there are plenty of other, saner ways to solve this problem.

For example,

Debtors’ Prisons

If you’re in prison, you don’t have to worry about whether or not you can afford a mortgage with your crushing student loan payments! You’ve already got a place to live!

I mean, not so much live as survive (maybe), but why get into semantics. And as a bonus, the for-profit prison industry totally wins! The guys who run it seem cool and normal. Only good can come from this.

Thanos

I know Thanos gets a bad rap and everything, but hear me out here. If you cancel half the population, you will technically cancel half of the student debt!

Go To Mars

I know what you’re thinking. “But Natalia, Mars is for rich people who will go there after they’ve utterly destroyed this planet.” Sure, yeah, got a point there, pedant.

But consider the fact that plenty of Mars missions are bound to end in disaster. I mean, so far, it seems like an issue of simple probability. We need a population of desperate volunteers who will show us how to not run a mission and a colonization plan. So student debtors will be dying for a noble cause AND escaping loan sharks. Sallie Mae can’t sue you in space! No, that will only happen when the lobbyists get there.

Gamma-ray Burst

Speaking of space, one of these gamma-ray bad boys can come out of nowhere and kill everything on this planet, at any time.

Do we really want to take the trouble to fix the student debt situation considering the possibility of such a burst boiling everyone’s collective eyeballs the second after you’re done reading this article? Didn’t think so.

Wandering Black Hole

Ditto.

Go Ahead And Let China Take Over Everything

We have a problem with education. China has re-education camps. I sense synergy!

Fuck It, Just Be Like John Donne 

So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
‘Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.

I don’t know if there’s an answer in these lines per se, but they are also very beautiful. Let us distract ourselves with beautiful things as a matter of policy — let others rail against the uselessness of English degrees. If I’m going to die in the gutter while rats nibble on my body and gold-plated Teslas fly by, I’m going to do it with the dignity of the supreme knowledge awarded to me via incurring an impossible debt burden that landed me in the gutter in the first place.

Take that, haters and losers. Since I am also educated enough to know that death is but the illusion of the animal mind, I *really* look forward to lording this over everyone in the life to come.

See you on the flip side, ignorant motherfuckers.

Photo credit: Tom Woodward