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Dear [REDACTED]
You were the kind person to explain the reality of what an educational loan is when I was confused and the information finally got through the layers of self-deception and for that matter, the layers of belief that I was programmed to have. And the core of that belief was: if you want to go to school, there will be a way to pay for it. This of course is not true. What I want to talk about here is what this policy, this system of educational finance, implies about our country and its fundamental mythology.
There is a school of public policy that believes that we can build better systems for our people by understanding how the world works, how we serve justice, how we decide to tax or not tax, how we elect representatives, how we decide to subsidize certain industries, how we feed our people and look to see empirically and theoretically what impact those policies have. It is implicit to this philosophy that ultimately we can distinguish between better or worse policies even though we may not be wise enough to predict the implications up front. The law of unintended consequences continues to screw up our best laid plans. Its complicated out there in the real world. When things go bad sometimes it is because people are being evil, but usually they are just wrong. Or the context changed. Or maybe people were not thinking it through. I have a favorite example and it involves the fairness of our elections. Every Southerner is familiar with various schemes to disenfranchise people of color and people who are poor. We have been doing it for a long time and we are good at it. One way we do this is to finance the election infrastructure by county, not by state. Well its not a surprise to learn that some counties are richer than others and that furthermore wealth is correlated with race. Furthermore, it turns out that some of the election systems are not as robust and have a higher percentage of either a misfire when a voter accidentally does not vote for their chosen candidate or when a ballot must be thrown out for technical reasons. And so it turns out that in a close election, this may be all you need to rig the game. That is the implication of the hanging chad, those chads did not hang at random. Those chads were associated with the cheaper and older voting systems in those predominantly black and poorer counties.
But my point is not about who won that election, or how that system came to be, my point is that we can not be blind to the implications of our system of financing election infrastructure, not after 2000. As a Southerner I was really annoyed. Fix the goddamn voting machines, I thought to myself. I am tired of hearing about it. Yes it will cost a little money, deal with it. How we chose to finance that part of our system of government turns out to have implications that are important. We may not be able to end racism or feed the hungry but at least in this case we can make our elections just a little more fair. We should do it.
How we pay for education in this country is a non trivial part of who has access to education and also to who has access to elite education. Because, in case you had not noticed, America is incredibly elitist. Its not that there arent a few exceptions who through merit or luck can transcend their origins, it can and does happen. But the odds are not great. I laugh when I hear that a justice is an "originalist" because I am from Virginia and in Virginia elections were always for the several hundred families, all intermarried, who were the equivalent of landed gentry, plus a few merchants and bankers and craftsmen if they were well liked. I am very fond of Virginia on a number of different levels and I am proud to be from there. The first rule of an elite who has power is to see to it that they maintain power for their class and set. Not everyone realizes that one reason the military is so important to a Southerner is because it is a recognized way to improve your lot in life, to pay for an education, to have a career if you were not born with one. In 21st century America things are different than they were in 18th century Chesapeake. Now you may need a Doctor of Philosophy just to have a good middle class life. And you may need to be a member of certain clubs to run for office even though there is nothing on paper that says you have to belong.
If the American dream is contingent on who can get an advanced degree, then how we pay for it is crucial. The only people who can get loans are people who dont need one is a fundamental philosophy of every loan officer. This is not a level playing field. I am disappointed, one more time, in the harsh reality of America so different from its promise.
Thank you again for your patience and your good will.
