on the student debt crisis

Posted on May 12, 2013 by

There is one. It’s a crisis by which I am decidedly unaffected. I will be graduating this spring with a B.A. and zero debt.

I chose my university according to my budget.

I won’t be paying my own (nonexistent) student debt, but with taxes, I will probably be paying yours. Irrespective of that, and despite the fact that I feel I made a decision and that forgiving student debt is unfair because other people made a different one and would not face the consequences of their decision with such a proposal, I would in no way criticize any student who chose an extremely expensive, prestigious school despite inability to afford it. This is because in all rationality I know that, unfortunately, my sentiment that an action to partially or entirely relieve someone of student debt is somehow “unfair” is a result of a false sense of threatened security: as though the more students who are in inconceivable degrees of debt, the more advantage I have in this economy.

That is, of course, untrue. The perception that in order for someone to be financially successful, someone else has to be unsuccessful, is an economically false one. And it’s exactly how people who accumulate their wealth by screwing over other people want me to feel. The reality is that people who can not afford expensive, prestigious schools are people like me. And the best way to ensure that people like me don’t get in the way of people like them is to turn me against myself–is to make me feel that helping you out because you made a different decision, because you didn’t compromise on your educational dreams for money, is somehow unfair. The reality is I don’t actually have an advantage. (Who am I kidding? I’m just like you.) The reality is even if I had an advantage it’s one I would have had unfairly, gained from a system whose premise is to force people like to me to choose between something that is vital to financial security and compromising that security, like a Catch 22. With education. With something that is, according to how our nation functions, supposed to be a civil right. In fact, it’s one that you can’t even opt out of practicing. It’s a civil requirement.

The reality is I graduated high school with all the promise of anyone who would attend an expensive, prestigious school. The reality is my high school English instructor, upon discovering that I would choose not to attend an expensive, prestigious school, insisted, “But Nahida, you’re a thinker,” with a tone of great distress. “There is a difference.”

Yeah, there fucking is a difference. I’m convinced the crap people tell you about how your school is just as good as an Ivy League are either (1) trying to make themselves feel better with delusion or (2) attending an Ivy League with the aforementioned false belief about economic success.

Elizabeth Warren is proposing a bill that give students the same rate as the bankers. (Which in some cases is ZERO PERCENT interest.) Which is like, the most OBVIOUS MOVE IN THE WORLD. The reality is, we have all been screwed over beyond an extent we even realize. By people who do exactly that to make money.

Once upon a time (and I don’t even WHEN!) when someone became wealthy, their community prospered with them. I don’t think that’s ever demonstrably been true, but when bankers and big business are claiming it is and that’s why they should get off on taxes and receive subsidies, you bet I’m sure as fuck going to hold them to that golden standard. And when it’s clearly not happening you bet I’m going to cut off their unearned advantages. Because when that doesn’t happen, it means the people who are accumulating wealth are doing it illegally. They are leaning on the support of your taxes and your labor, and they are not contributing to the prosperity of our civilization in return. You don’t need to gain over someone’s loss–not when you earn your money honesty. You can even forget treating students like bankers. Goddammit, treat bankers like ME.

I’ve heard people tell friends of mine who went to Harvard and Duke and are inconsolably distressed over their debt that they shouldn’t have chosen these schools to begin with. Why the fuck not? They made amazing grades and did amazing things. What doesn’t entitle them to that kind of education? (Say it: class; admit that’s what you want–the poor out of your precious schools.) The perfect debtor is much like the perfect victim: nonexistent.

I didn’t want to go to Duke or Harvard. I would have been living in New York. And I would’ve returned to California, but the experience–living alone somewhere unfamiliar and having to function daily that way–would’ve taught me an invaluable amount of independence.

I didn’t do it for my education because I would have had to pay interest on loans, which is Islamically illegal, but I would in no way criticize any student who chose an extremely expensive, prestigious school despite inability to afford it; I know what it’s like, not in this but elsewhere, to risk all stability to relentlessly pursue a passion.

Posted in class, social justice | 3 Comments

It’s one of those days

Posted on May 9, 2013 by

when I feel ready to give up on everything.

The worst part about things like this, is knowing you want to cry but being unable. And so you’re trapped in this strange half-finished uncomfortable state of just bordering tears.

In other news (?!) my classes are over–I may be writing more frequently soon. I have a number of finals and then I’ve completed my degree, with three months free until the next one. Three whole months to write to you.

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“collective” sin

Posted on May 9, 2013 by

Islam, thankfully, rejects the belief in Original Sin (17:15), and in fact anyone disabled of full mental capacity also loses the ability to sin, until (and unless) that capacity is restored–that includes children before reaching an age of understanding and, less often mentioned, the dreamer before waking.

I was taught this as I grew up, and I was also taught that although sins aren’t inherited, the sins of a parent can harm the child. Of course this sounds obvious, but I’m not talking about parents sinning in their behavior against their children (alcoholism, abuse, etc.); I am talking about the ways that can be attributed specifically to Islamic philosophy: parents are expected to leave their children a monetary inheritance, for example, and a parent who makes a living stealing will leave the child money that is haraam, sinful to accept.

In other words while no one is born having inherited sin or as sinful by default, you can be born into a situation where you sin unless you do something. Or really–if you do do something; accepting that money is viewed as its own action–a perpetuation and active continuation of the wrongs that your parents began.

Manifested in a larger sphere, we are sinning all the time. I would like to believe I am aware when I feel that something is being wrongfully taken from me of whether it was truly mine in the first place. Was it mine–rightfully–or was I merely benefiting from the perpetuation of a legacy established in sin, something I wouldn’t have been entitled to in the first place?

To become indignant about something that was never yours is, I believe, one of the greatest forms of arrogance.

Whether the sin itself is being counted to any degree is a different question than the effects of it; the former depends on whether the situation of need modifies one’s agency, which is why I don’t torment myself with the idea that I’m sinning on such a massive level, and why I don’t expect people to blame themselves to the point of psychological derangement: the child who eats from what is purchased with stolen money, for example, is sinless compared to when s/he inherits that money–not merely because of the development in mental capacity, but the change in need: hunger is something uncontrolled, that infringes on the ability to act freely, obstacles (why isn’t this a verb; this should totally be a verb) a person’s ability to reason, rendering them momentarily incapable of sin. The effects are still (equally) harmful for those from whom you are stealing, but the weight of the sin is lessened. It is important that we are both unrelentingly loving and unrelentingly just to ourselves, because this is to be virtuous.

Not everything that is “taken” from you merits as much outrage as when you’re starving though. Sometimes we have to suffer a little to right the wrongs of the situation in which we were born. And that is just and justice, because in its execution nothing is being “taken” from which we would not have benefitted from the first place.

We remind ourselves that had our parents not sinned, we would have never had these luxuries anyway, so alleviation from the “suffering” we now experience is not something to which we are entitled, and therefore nothing is being taken, no suffering is being inflicted–undeserved relief is being retracted, relief which we experience wrongfully at the expense of others.

It seems no one has an issue with this in any other context–gifts of stolen merchandise, for example, are still lawfully the property of the entity from whom they were stolen. Generations of parents endowing their generations of children with generations of stolen gifts, however–well, everyone cries for the children.

Posted in Islam, social justice | 2 Comments

winged

Posted on May 8, 2013 by

Minutes ago I was staring contemplatively into the boiling water of the pasta I was cooking, imagining with grim fascination the torments of Hell and the sweltering of human blood. It is a habit I inherited, for better or worse, from my mother, who can not gaze upon the sun without shuttering in horror–or stare at the beauty of a coursing river without singing the praises of God.

I did not ask for forgiveness as my virtuous mother does upon remembering the wrath of Hell in the boiling pasta water. My heart was too suspended in awed reprehension. I think I might have sobbed it, at some subconscious level, but remained altogether too engrossed with the churning heat–

when, entered in my vision, the sprawled wings of a tiny insect rushed callously through the current. The minuscule thing had been boiled alive! Immediately my hand leapt to the knob, but all of rationality resisted turning off the heat (it would, after all, still continue to boil if I did.) The poor creature was surely dead–it wouldn’t allow itself to be flung whichever way the liquid tossed it if it weren’t. I felt a cry within me. What to do now? Continue cooking? How unbearable it seemed, to allow the small creature to be thrust so cruelly back and forth in the currents. I lowered a spoon into the water to retrieve its body. It washed to it on the fifth attempt, wings folded neatly.

As though it were nothing, I washed it down the drain.

What to do now? (Had I killed it?) (Surely I’ve killed millions like it.) (Is that better?) (No, but why does it feel better?) (It landed in boiling water on its own, stupid thing.) (Perhaps it were dead already?) What to do now? I did only what I knew: finished cooking the pasta, poured out the water… as though nothing had happened, as though there were no soft shock.

Posted in uncategorized | 1 Comment

Update #2: here take my ideas

Posted on May 2, 2013 by

A few months ago a very, very good friend of mine, at the prospect of having a Mormon for president, revealed a sentiment along the lines of, “I know it doesn’t matter to you, Nahida, but it feels kind of sad and strange not to have a president who’s not your religion for the first time.”

No, in fact, it did not matter to me at all. I did not care about his sadness.

Okay, I kind of cared. (I experienced for a moment an amplified sense of unbelonging and felt an unprecedented rush of empathy. Don’t ask me why. I do not understand my heart or why it breaks.) But I didn’t really want to care. Let’s just pretend I didn’t then.

Dear readers, I have my Bachelor’s at the end of May, and I’m pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in the coming Fall, and I am working part-time at a job that both pays a little more than I expected and is delightfully flexible.

And I am somehow unhappy.

I am not fond of being exhaustingly aware. I’ve had a sense of detachment my whole life that I’d attributed simply to my nature. (I don’t doubt it really is.) I simultaneously feel very deeply. The unfolding compassion of my childhood resulted from a belief that everyone was this way. The increasingly defiant silence of the years that followed resulted from a slow discovery that they are not.

Let me tell you how to teach your classes. Are you at a loss of how anything like sex, or race, could ever be a question as grand, as impactive, as universally poignant a statement on the human condition, as the literary analysis of life and death, of monstrosity, of virtue and its loss, of good and evil, of the injustice of justice?

Discuss the ways in which the individual is lost to history.

You can have it, really. You can have all of it. I don’t care anymore.

Anais Nin writes, “Had I not created my whole world, I would have certainly died in other people’s.” Apply.

After all, as they say, it was never mine.

Posted in feminism, race, social justice | Leave a comment

It’s May. [Update #1]

Posted on May 1, 2013 by

Is it already? I meant to write something. (I actually meant to write quite a lot.) But–well, it didn’t happen. So here are a number of updates.

About halfway through the semester, a woman in one of my English classes had expressed dissatisfaction that she wasn’t able to read a lot of the “classics” she thought she would be reading as an English major, because so much of “ethnic studies” had made a literary presence in the department.

Let’s examine the unspoken premises here: (1) “Ethnic” people can not write classics, and/or (2) Anything incorporating analysis with “ethnic awareness,” or race studies, is not as extravagant a question as the “classic” musings on the human condition. Because racism is not a human experience. Well I mean, it’s not an important one. It’s not as grand as other literary subjects, like death or the sublime.

You see, once upon a time, English and Comparative Literature were actually two different departments. The whites were separated from the coloreds and everyone was happy. Then, one dreadful day, some people who were clearly suffering from too much political correctness actually decided to combine them together, on the basis that treating comparative literature as though it isn’t mainstream just because it’s written in languages not English is completely arbitrary to the study of literature. Or at least arbitrary according to them. I mean, it’s called English literature for a reason right? Being white has nothing to do with it, just Englishness. It’s not like we ever translate Greek lit–

Oh wait.

I have something to ask those who feel that “race” or “sex” don’t belong among the universal human experiences that are explored in literature and literature classrooms.

On what grounds?

Why are your questions about life larger than mine? Why do we have to explore the complexities of good and evil exposed by literature only on your terms, according to your human experiences? Why should I be expected to relate to your experiences as universal when you aren’t expected to relate to mine?

Why do you get to call yours universal, significant, penetrating the depths of human truths–apolitical–and accuse me of a political agenda on the assumption that–what? You are the exemplar of all humankind? That your experience of race–and trust me, you do have one despite your ardent denial–is the ultimate, that your awareness of race, under the pretense of not concerning yourself with it, as told from the perspective of the status quo is to remain unquestioned or else I am making the classroom political?

The problem isn’t that I am making you discuss race or sex when you don’t want to discuss it in literature. The problem is that I am changing the terms in which you discuss it. The truth is you were already discussing it, by default–except from your perspective, under the guise of “normality.” The truth is that before women’s studies you only had Male Studies in every class–history, biology, English, medicine was taught based on what was proven to work on male patients. The truth is that before comparative literature you already had White Literature. The truth is you were always discussing race, you were always discussing sex, and you were always discussing them as questions worthy of exploration alongside death and nature and the sublime and identity.

Why the sudden change of approach?

Do you believe English literature was truly English literature before I came along with my intellectual honesty political correctness? That you weren’t already obsessed with race? That it was English literature, not White literature?

Why have you translated the Greeks?

Posted in feminism, identity, sex, social justice | 5 Comments

Spoiler Alert

Posted on April 20, 2013 by

Nahida does, in fact, return.

Posted in uncategorized | 2 Comments