The pressure of being in debt keeps the citizens of America in a slave-like state. No, there aren’t lashes on our backs or some high-tech neck brace that controls our actions. Rather, there is a desire for the American dream and an endless sea of debt en route to its acquisition.
While many of us fly star-spangled flags in the name of freedom, the entire structure of our society — with its lack of universal health care, unreal college tuition prices, loosely regulated credit cards, and shady real estate market — establishes a populace living under the indentured servitude of owing multiple agencies huge amounts of funds.
In that servitude, we grow more desperate and more dependent on our work forces than ever. We sacrifice union rights, personal well-being and even fundamental ethics just to get by.
Our debt-riddled lives begin as soon as we step foot on this campus as a student. A higher education is obviously one of the most important things people in our society should be shooting for as it provides them with extended career choices and a generally better life. But at what price?
In 2009, the average student debt rose to a staggering $24,000. Since 1982, tuition prices rose 439 percent. When we graduate and get that degree, the pressure clinches in, and we go from broke college students to desperate graduates in an unfriendly economy with a six-month time bomb laced on our chests.
From there, we get jobs that serve as our means of not only paying off our debts and granting us a living, but worse: They are the providers of our health insurance.
It looks great when our careers provide us with health care. There’s something wrong, however, with a job providing someone with a service that just about every other developed nation provides to its citizens. Only the United States, Mexico and Turkey don’t provide nearly universal health insurance.
How does this affect our population? Well, it makes workers more dependent on their jobs and much less likely to complain about injustices, develop strong unions and demand reasonable wages. If losing their jobs means losing their health care and missing out on student loan payments, they’d be much more likely to just stay quiet and take the hits to their pride.
Of course, everyone should have a reasonable alliance to their workplace, but you can’t believe in a democracy or workers’ rights if you believe people should be so dependent on their jobs that they don’t have a right to heal themselves of sicknesses if they are unemployed.
The personal debt within America is about $2 trillion, or about $117,951 per household. Our people are under incredible financial pressure, and it seems as if corporations and the government are OK with it.
The United States was hasty in bailing out corporations that were crumbling because of poor practices. And yet, when their citizens are stumbling into record-high personal debts, and college tuition prices show no signs of showing down, our government acts as though those issues are too big and too polarizing to make any significant changes.
It looks like we know whose debt the government finds important and whose debt politicians aren’t interested in aiding.
If the government wanted to do something to aid Americans, just as easily as it came to conclusion to aid banks with billions of dollars, it would aid those people in which it is supposed to be serving.
Our society cannot consider itself a healthy democracy if it doesn’t do anything to relieve the outrageous debts piled upon us. We need to be able to make ethical decisions, fight for our rights in our workplaces and reduce the amount of power debt manufacturing agencies have over our lives.
But as of now, personal debts will continue to haunt the people of this nation, and the American dream we’ve been told about all our lives rings as hollow as our pockets.
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