How We Got Here

As a person in a household that has been doing the right things, that is, saving, investing, paying bills on time, and keeping up with our mortgage, I most definitely relate to Rick Santelli’s rant about the Obama mortgage bailout plan. Yes Rick, 90% of us will be bailing out losers and putting more money in the hands of crooks; however, this does not come as a surprise in an America I have learned, over the years, to disrespect.

Rick Santelli was on Kudlow last Friday night expressing, once again, his dislike for the new Obama mortgage bailout plan and he said something to the effect that “there are no do-overs in life." Weeelll... I’ve been an educator in this country for twenty years now; and the single most important thing our education system has been set up to teach is that life is nothing but one big do-over, and that, in fact, one does not have to work very hard at all to get “bailed out”. Take for instance what happened to my husband, a professor in one of our top public universities (ranked #22 by U.S. News[1]).

As in all universities in this country, final exams are scheduled for periods of three hours, but that does not mean they have to be three hours long (or at least it didn’t when I was in school). On one semester my husband decided to make his final a short one and told the students that he was giving them a one and a half hour test. In other words, he was giving them a short test that would not require more than one and a half hours to complete.

The day of the exam came; most students were done before the shortened period, and after one and a half hours my husband collected the test. Unsurprisingly, one little prick, who incidentally got a B[2] in the class and whose career grades hovered in the B and C range, started calling my husband’s office to complain that he had not had enough time to complete said exam. My husband explained to him that he had told the class that the exam was short and that the student should have been prepared. Little Prick then called the chairman of the department who told him that the professor (my husband) acted within his rights.

Little Prick, having learned how to milk the system, then grieved. My husband had to go to “court”, where a panel of administrators and brain-washed professors decided that Little Prick should have had three hours to complete his one and a half hour test. Me, I would have given him the do-over of his life: a three hour multiple choice test that no one but the best student from the University of Chicago Economics Department could possibly pass. Little Prick would have begged for his B back and would have even accepted a C[3]. But that was not what the Grievance Committee was recommending, it recommended that Little Prick get an A; and Little Prick got the A he so valiantly fought for.

So Dear Rick, in a world where A stands for okAy and B for Bad; and where if one gets a B, one can get an A just by asking for it (kinda like a mortgage a few months back), it is no wonder we have arrived at our current state of affairs. Maybe at one point in time America wasn’t about do-overs; but it is most certainly about that now. And, you might ask, "What of us who do 'the right thing'?" Well Rick, we just keep getting fucked over by little pricks....

[1] A ranking that seems as meaningful as Moody’s rankings of mortgage backed securities.
[2] Remember B? It used to stand for “Good”.
[3] Remember C?! It used to stand for “Average”.