disparity | The Direction of Intention

Do A Bit Of Reading [David’s blog on saturday morning smack-dab]

Posted on September 16, 2023 by davidrobinsoncreative

Yes. It’s true. I’ve been paying on my student loans for 22 years and I currently owe more now than the original loan. That little statistic is not an accident. I am not alone. There are so many of me, in fact, that our economy will teeter when payments resume.

The mechanism was set up in the Reagan years, a mechanism that has more recently been echoed in the Affordable Care Act. What seems like a good idea at the time, accessibility to education, accessibility to healthcare, is in actuality a shell game. The government provides a subsidy-or-loan-program for an industry yet places no cap on what the industry can charge. It places little regulation on how the loans are structured and serviced. It’s a money-making-machine in the guise of a social program. Tax dollars to corporate pockets. Compare the cost of an education in 1988 to what it is today. Compare the cost of healthcare in the USA relative to other developed nations. Once in the trap, it’s nigh-on impossible to escape it.

Do a bit of reading before you weigh in on student loan forgiveness. For extra credit, compare the amount of recent loan forgiveness granted to businesses (not to mention the amount given to large corporations when the economy melted down in the Bush years – due to bad corporate/market practices) relative to the amount proposed for student loan forgiveness by the Biden administration. Student loan forgiveness is peanuts in comparison though the impact on real people would be profound.

For extra-extra credit, keep in mind that humor is often the result of other people’s pain… it’s possible that this cartoon will strike your funny bone since the pain for us is real. We hope it strikes a slightly different bone.

read Kerri’s blogpost about PREDATORY LOANS

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Rise [on Merely A Thought Monday]

Posted on April 13, 2020 by davidrobinsoncreative

sane copy

Signs of the the times. 1) The salutation in almost very email I send, every email I receive, is this: Stay safe. Stay well. 2) The most common response to”How are you?” is some variation of this: Staying more or less sane.

More or less sanity.

I expect a revival of Salvador Dali, a new wave of surrealism. What was solid melts and drips. What was fluid is frozen. None of the rules of normality apply. “So this is what pandemic feels like,” Chris wrote.

The hat we call “normal” has been knocked off our heads. Nothing is normal. Or is it? In our house we have an ongoing socio/political conversation about whether things have always been this way and, in the severity of the moment, we are now seeing it. The ugly politics. The gaping disparity. Or, is this madness new? Are we more or less sane now?

We’re taking our afternoon walks in the cemetery at the end of the street. It is the only place we can walk without having to be constantly vigilant about bumping into other people. “It’s weird that, in the midst of a pandemic, we have to go to a cemetery to safely walk.” Kerri noted.

Yes. It is weird. Is it more or less sane? The only thing we can know is that all measuring sticks are broken, all of the old navigation points have gone missing. We are standing solidly in the midst of the unknown. What will be true next week? Anything is possible.

And, that is the point. The sword of possibility cuts both ways. Right now, anything is possible. If we get caught in the sticky notion that our circumstance defines us, then we are hurled to the side of less sanity. Panic. Chaos. Fear. Every man/woman for themselves. If we hold fast the notion that we are creators and are experiencing but not defined by the present pandemic fire, then renewal and re-imagination pull us in the direction of sanity. We stay centered in the midst of the fury. People helping people to survive, to thrive. The best rises in us. Brother’s/Sister’s keeper, and all of that. More sane. Not less.

read Kerri’s blog post about MORE OR LESS SANE