Watching the News
Good morning ladies and gentlemen. Do you watch the news? Read the papers? And do you ponder what you see? Really give it some thought to try to understand the DEEPER MEANING of it all? Well, perhaps we shouldn’t. Perhaps our lives would be better served by ignoring the news and concentrating on our own spiritual development. Unfortunately I don’t seem to be wired that way. And the news is pissing me off.
Sometimes the random order of stories on a newscast accidentally points to a larger truth. Weird juxtapositions leading to even weirder conclusions. And so it goes. Let me show you what I mean. Last night the nice news lady on some channel told me all about the 32% increase in Public University fees next year. After some hand wringing, she moved on to a story about the elite rich town of Tiburon in Marin County and their decision to record the license plate numbers of EVERY SINGLE PERSON WHO ENTERS THEIR CITY. This brilliant plan will allow their police to immediately investigate every outsider if a crime is committed. (As a quick aside, how the fuck can this possibly be legal? Land of the free my ass.)
Here we have two seemingly unrelated stories. Do you see the deeper pattern? Well, I do. And that’s why I’m the Reverend. (And possibly because I’m crazy and paranoid.) So here goes. Before WW2, the GI Bill, and the affluence of the middle class, higher education used to be the privilege of the fairly rich. It was an easy way to control the masses through ignorance. During the last fifty years the chance to better yourself and your situation through a college degree was offered to pretty much everybody. Rich, poor, dark or light skinned, immigrant, conservative or liberal. Apparently this has become too much threat to the ruling squirrel elite and they are shutting it down.
The easiest way to keep people from advancing is to keep them out of school. It’s no accident that inner city social dynamics insure that black men almost never escape through education. And now the elite are bold enough to make it too expensive for another entire class of people. Oh sure, in theory education will still be open. But as Anatole France said “”The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” And we’re letting them do it.
The official response to the protests around the fee hike was equally fascinating. It seems that more money will be made available for student loans in order to help poorer students stay in school. (Gee, where did that money come from?) It’s estimated that a student using this program can expect to have about $100,000.00 in debt after graduation. And that’s just for undergraduates. Hope you don’t want an advanced degree. When they used this kind of program for immigration it was called indentured servitude. Is there much difference between “We’ll give you a ride on the boat to a better job but you’ll have to work for years to pay it off” and “We’ll get you a degree to get you a better job but…”
So let me get this straight. The poor kids just can’t go to college any more and the middle class kids can go but will essentially be indentured servants when they graduate. Meanwhile the rich kids still get to go to Stanford while daddy pays. Is it any surprise that neighborhoods like Tiburon are beginning to feel like castles? As the rich get richer and everyone else bends over to get fucked, it’s pretty clear why they’d want to keep track of who dares drive through their domain. See, I told you these stories were connected. The nice news lady might even have suspected it. But what are we going to do about it? Viva la Revolucion. Vaya con Dios. Amen.