Punishing the poor

I don’t understand why the editorial writers opined against student debt cancellation. Arkansas is the fifth-poorest state in the nation. Benton and Saline are the only two counties with a poverty rate of less than 10%. I know this because I’m an organizer for the Poor People’s Campaign and I study these things.

It’s immoral that poor students are required to take out student loans, and then be asked to pay them back with half a job or no job at all. Moreover, the editorial writers’ affordable education alternative is abominably sexist as it proffers industrial jobs in a labor-intensive workforce dominated by men.

This idea that poor people must be punished, and that low-income and low-wealth people will be taxed to death because the feds may forgive student loans is immoral and extreme. The biggest burden on American taxpayers is our war economy, which is set to spend upward of $800 billion per year on weapons, war, and genocide.

College grads don’t need lessons in humility or accountability, not from people who preach pro-life all day and then rally for policies that drain the life out of them the very next day. The real college lesson here is that America’s guilty conscience for its multitude of broken contracts and crimes against humanity is evident in its defense spending. College grads know that now because they’ve witnessed it in real time. American history is a series of vulnerable people standing up for their rights to live free and just lives only to be met with insurmountable militarized violence.

There ain’t no holes being dug ’round here, but there are certainly a lot of unnecessary graves being dug because so many Arkansans continue to cling to an old-time slave economy that places profit over people.

ANISSA FORD Haskell