Let’s all help out with college debt

Debt has crushed the dreams of many millennials, but we have a chance to lift ourselves up

The only true misfortune I have blessedly thus far experienced in my life has been belonging to the generation that was indoctrinated with the idea that after high school you had to go to college.

There was no refusal, no rebuke to the wisdom of our baby boomer or early Generation X parents. Your only instruction, your ultimate goal: get into “a good school” and get your degree, period.

My generation was, and even still for the younger members is, aggressively focused on being college bound, simply because this has been the sole expectation of our parents, with no true regard, or perhaps more accurately and fairly no foresight, for what comes after — and simply because they have fervently believed that once you had your college degree in hand everything else is supposed to fall in line.

But what we have found is that you get your college degree and nothing falls in line — nothing at all is what you expected. In fact, your opportunities literally disintegrate before your eyes as you drown under the weight of your massive college debts.

I don’t know about other millennials, but my parents didn’t save for my college education; not that I blame them because I don’t. I watched my parents devote their lives to work, laboring under the misapprehension that their hard work would provide the motivation to their children to better educate themselves so that they did not have to kill themselves (figuratively) to survive. This they did, and it worked. However, with the ballooning number of millennials with college educations and high unemployment rates or jobs disproportionate to their education, this line of thinking has epically failed.

We are now a society who may not have the luxury of children who are able to care for themselves much less help care for aging parents who may require it. College debt is the beast looming over many of us, preventing us from fulfilling not only dreams, but basic needs, large and small.

I had an epiphany about college debt not long ago while waiting in the drive-through at McDonald’s for my morning coffee. I pulled up to the window with my change out and was met with a fresh-faced young lady who chirped at me with a smile, “The customer in front of you paid for yours.”

I blinked, quite dumbfounded, as I slowly pulled my handful of sweaty change back into my car and dropped it into my cup holder. I mumbled an “OK” as I pulled forward. The benevolent and mysterious patron was still in front of me being handed his or her own coffee and paper bag of breakfast perhaps.

This enigma was driving an older model maroon Suburban with peeling decals on the back. I don’t remember what they were, but from those weather-worn decals I inferred a sense of the person in front of me — probably a person not very different from myself. Someone driving the car they drive because it works or because it is paid off, someone going through their morning routine of coffee from McDonald’s because it’s cheap, someone who did a good deed for someone else not because they had to, but because they could and they wanted to.

The epiphany I had then was that we could, in some small way, make someone else’s day or change someone’s life — not because we have to but because we want to and because we can.

So, I have decided to attempt to create a call to action — not by our government but by ourselves — for the friends, family and perfect strangers who find themselves in this same suffocating quandary that is student loan debt.

Let us not depend on our government to pull us out and lift us up, let us try to pull each other up and lift each other out. We can create a domino effect!

By extending the hand of charity and standing in solidarity we can help each other recapture our dreams and pull away from the disappointment that is the sucking black hole of student loan debt.

What I am suggesting here is that people consider making a donation of any size to a GoFundMe page of an individual seeking student loan debt relief so the person receiving the donation can in effect pay it forward.

Help continue this call to action, this chain of remarkable intent toward each other. Let’s be the change we want to see in this world, as it were. Let’s all start making those small steps and do for ourselves and each other.