Senator Ted Cruz has come under fire for saying that most baristas are slackers who spend most of their days sucking bongs.
Now, Cockburn wasn’t always Cockburn. Like today’s youngsters, he had to mooch around working two jobs at once to pay the rent (after his parents cut off his allowance). So, when Cockburn says what he’s about to say, he says it with authority: Ted Cruz is right. It may be a hard truth but Cockburn has been there, done it and got the Grateful Dead T-shirt to prove it.
The Texas senator said:
There is a real risk if you are that slacker barista who wasted seven years in college studying completely useless things, now has loans, and can’t get a job, Joe Biden just gave you twenty grand.
Like, holy cow, that twenty grand, you know, maybe you weren’t gonna vote in November and suddenly, you just got twenty grand. And you know, if you can get off the bong for a minute and head down to the voting station, or just send in your mail-in ballot that the Democrats have helpfully sent you, it could drive up turnout, particularly among young people.
He’s right. Cockburn has seen with his own eyes a plethora of people studying back-to-back degrees in gender studies and theater, “because that’s what everyone does.” Of course, a minuscule percentage of these go on to do something half useful, but the reality is that most don’t.
Cruz’s comments were more about the state of higher education in this country than they were about young people. Most people are getting fleeced but are too naive to realize. And yeah, it sucks that young Becky can’t get a job after studying Sociology for six years but what did she expect? Now Becky realizes that she’s been duped into hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of debt by her university, but is it fair to push her problem on to the millions of Americans that studied something that actually got them a well-paying job?
It seems that we’re under a kind of blanket mass hysteria where we delude ourselves into thinking everyone is destined for greatness. They aren’t — and that’s fine. What else are your twenties for if it’s not dicking about in a dead-end job smoking a bit of weed with your just-as-useless friends? Some people serve flat whites to businessmen, get stoned and moan about “the system.” Ironically their complaints about the system would be better placed before they signed themselves into poverty by way of a Philosophy degree.
Cockburn thinks that we all need to accept that some people study dead-end degrees because they don’t want to grow up. But that doesn’t mean their mistakes should be state-subsidized.
