The fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper is a cautionary tale, and dare we say, a morality tale as well?
In it as you may already know, a hardworking and thrifty ant works through the summer putting away food and preparing for winter. The grasshopper, on the other hand, gallivants around making music and doing nothing to prepare nor setting aside any resources for food as it lives the good life in the now.
Come winter, the ant, having prepared, used thrift, and delayed its gratification, is well prepared for winter.
Not so the grasshopper.
Now Elizabeth Warren wants to turn this upon its head.
Warren want to take the saved surplus from those silly little ants who planned, were thrifty and even took out loans for their (or their chidren's) education and repaid them - and then give it to the partying grasshoppers who neither scrimped and saved, nor repaid their student loans.
After all, if you scrimp, save, and delay gratification so you or your children can have a better life later, then according to Warren and her supporters you're just a sucker, a sheep waiting to be sheared of the wool that was saved up for winter to be given to her supporters in exchange for votes.
No thanks.
1 comment:
I started high school the same year my one brother started college. He went to Olivet in southern Michigan. It cost the equivalent of a brand new car for each years tuition and room and board. My brother was a high school all American football player, and had offers at other schools, but choose this private school.
My parents helped him pay for school, and he did work during summer,plus he did play football for them,with no scholarship.
When it was my turn to decide what to do after I graduated high school, having a twin brother also, my parents told me that they would help me as much as they could. But after seeing what a strain that it put them through to send my brother through college there was no way that I would ever do that. For the record, I did have a chance to play football for a college on scholarship, plus I was an all American musician.
Instead, when I graduated high school, I got a job in a steel making factory, basically a melt shop, and spent the next 35 years of my life as a foundry worker. I have the burns and broken and worn out body to show for it. The biggest thing that would amaze people who don't know about those who work in jobs like mine, is that most of those who work there on the floor have a higher IQ than the average person on the street. To make the type of steel that goes into gun parts or into jet engines, takes more than just the proverbial mind that's weak and a back that's strong, ala Ernie Ford.
Of course, back when I graduated high school, in 1978, you could go to college, to a public school, much, much cheaper than you can now. Now, one must really step back and consider if the degree that they get is going to be worth the money that they will have to spend to obtain it. Unless it is in certain areas, often the answer is no.
I have said it before, but once I learned to read, I had no real need for school, other than sports and to learn to play music. I read everything I could get my hands on, from the dictionary, to encyclopedias, to Mailer, Fitzgerald, Ernie Pyle, etc. This from the age of 8 or so. I have not stopped, and now with books available in electronic form, I can go back and read some of the classics again. This age really is the best time ever to live in, if only kids would learn it young enough.
pigpen51
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