Never Walked In High Heels

In a culture when special interest groups and campaigns seem to dominate our understanding of value, people confuse the importance of disability rights, putting it on par with the save the Australian ostrich movement. It seems to my friends that issues, such as environmentalism, are somehow more important simply because its actually seen as an issue on CNN. So when I start talking about how it isn’t fair that I can’t get in to a pub, and my friends roll their eyes and tell me to come back when the campaign has a colored ribbon. 

I fight for disability rights by default, not because I have nothing better to do. Actually, I fight for my own rights first, and if that happens to help others behind me, so be it. It would be a lie to say I want to make the world better for all because I know that in paving the road for myself as an artist and businesswoman, I can do more to expand opportunity for others than if I just focused on disability rights. This is why I will never be a lobbyist or activist. I fight for my rights only for my own advancement. It is up to everyone else to take advantage of that progress.

However, the issue of disability rights is one worth plowing a new road for in my mind. It is not a stand alone topic that attempts to rescue a certain group, often at the expense of others. It is a good old battleground in a war that should have never needed to be fought in the first place. Like the Women’s Suffrage movement and Abolition, this is an issue which, in 200 years time, people will look back at and wonder how such a large majority could be so barbaric. 

When I look for equal treatment, I’m not looking for special treatment… as some  have accused me of in the past. I’m not even looking for my dignity as some activists shout about. My dignity can only be given to me by myself. My freedom is mine only because I fight to protect it, not because anybody else chose to give it to me. But when I am looking for is the willingness to improve the world which you will soon inherit. The world needs to be changed not just for me, but for you. Your body will soon break down and fail you and the standards of living you allow for me are the ones you will have to deal with in your aged years. It is only then that you may see the misconceived assumptions of the able-bodied world.

Here’s hoping my friends will catch on before it’s too late for them. 

Nobody in Sunday school ever teaches us that waiting is such an act of faith. 

When someone says, “Living on faith,” our mind automatically goes to some poor missionary family living in hostile Russia, speaking out illegally, and having Bible studies in their living room with the authorities at their door, ready to barge in at any moment. And while this form of faith is to be applauded, victorious bravery is not the only kind of faith there is.

When Noah built the ark in a region of the desert that had not seen rain for years, that was an act of faith. Going into his workshop every day, molding the wood because God told him to, when everyone else thought he was a madman, was really asking for trouble in a lot of ways. We look at the story of Noah, and we see faith, we see virtue largely in the second part of the story. The man who collected animals in order to save them and lived in his boat for weeks as the flood waters rose and fell. It is, of course, amazing that God singled out this family to survive the destruction of the world as He pulled out His Etch-a-Sketch and decided to start over, but this version  forgets about the years of work preceding the flood and the effort it took to build the ark. 

No doubt he was laughed at, scorned, and even harassed to varying levels of degrees in his own workshop. In many ways, it was the day to day mundane faith it took to believe in the voice of God and build a contraption that few in the region had ever seen, which was more noble than waiting and serving the creatures of God on a boat during the flood. 

It is all too common for us contemporary Christians to dismiss our lives as being too mundane to excitingly serve God. As Francis Bacon wrote, “Large changes are easier than small,” and it seems that we fantasize that God can only be glorified through the exciting service on the mission field rather than within the lives of suburbia. If I was to tell you that God demands the same from both of His servants, many people would take that to mean that everyone should sell their possessions and move to the bush. Then what would happen to suburbia?

God didn’t first ask Noah’s neighbors to build an ark and was declined by those neighbors. Nor did He ask Noah to take such extreme measures regularly throughout his life. Rather, it was the day by day form of living at the meal table in the garden and how Noah interacted with members of his own community that made God point the finger at Noah and say, “This family I love. And this family I shall save.” 

I think we often trick ourselves into thinking less is assumed of us because God made us bankers or doctors or even janitors, but God asks a man who is slow of speech to be the leader of the Israelites out of Egypt. God does not make extraordinary people to serve in extraordinary situations. Rather, we are all ordinary people, handcrafted by God and each deeply and intricately made in detail to be in the exact position we find ourselves in, be it a lawmaker or a janitor, and we specifically are made to serve in those parts. So, so much of that is, of course, waiting patiently for God to show Himself to us. 

Waiting is a limbo. Waiting is probably one of the most annoying parts of the human condition as it means that we once again have to give up control. There’s nothing we can do, no way to change the situation, no way to speed things up or slow things down. It’s not like our math books in school where we can peek at the back and find out the answer. And in that waiting time, we question everything. We all do. It’s human nature. Did we read the signs correctly? Did we miss anything? Will God provide, or are we just deluding ourselves? And every day, of course, that waiting becomes more and more difficult to deal with. It’s supposed to. Giving up control is always supposed to become difficult.

When we wait, we watch God, realizing that our hands are tied, and there’s little else we can do. Sometimes God is visible through our waiting, but more often than not, we find ourselves questioning His existence as much as growing impatient. Every leaf that shudders during this time, we try to fit into our cosmology as one would the bottom of a teacup after emptying its contents. We think our hands are tied, and as I’ve said before, there is little we can do, but, of course, there is much we can do as well. We cannot speed up or slow down what we are waiting for, but this is the time that we must allow God to work and glorify the work that He is doing, even when we doubt its existence.

No doubt about it, Susan Boyle’s singing performance last week was impeccable. It was one of those acts that can only come from years of calloused hands, broken dreams, the refusal to believe you’re above cleaning toilets, and an incredible fire, which will not let you back down in the face of rejection. And, she showed her talent successfully with one of the most overdone songs in musical theatre. Young singers mostly lack the depth sing honestly, without “performing”, and drama school students are often too idealistic in what the profession “ought to be” to even bother trying to be that open. I know those looks of dread from the judges; I have seen them in auditions and in drama school. The refusal of the teachers to admit that one is talented - the insistence that she be handed a tambourine when she can compose a concerto - is exactly why I dropped out of training. Pre-judging is the standard of my industry. 

In the aftermath of the shock, Youtube, blogs, and chatrooms have lit up talking about her performance. “We were wrong,” they say. “She is amazing”… The praise goes on in the type of circular talks, found only in our modern cyber communications. And then I saw a post on a disability-related message board which disturbed me. The title was “Susan Boyle: is she one of us?” It then explained the numerous ways that Ms. Boyle could be seen as disabled, how she was affected by prejudice, and how this triumph was a call to arms for disability arts. By the end of the post, I marveled that the singer could even get out bed in the morning, she sounded so deformed. Then came the torrent of replies and threads: “yes she is disabled,” “no she’s not disabled enough,” “I’m more disabled than she is, and I can sing better, why wasn’t I on?” Again, I am reminded how much I am disturbed to see people choose to crawl on their bellies when they can still remain upright with some dignity. 

Here’s a thought: She is one of us. She’s human. 

What this situation highlights is everyone else’s discrimination that occurred after she opened her mouth to sing the first note. In my mind this hindsight discrimination is even worse than the discrimination which occurred before she sang. She is qualified to hold her own among the best, yet the people who posted such responses choose to see her only in terms of what she is not, rather than what she is. In addition to such practice of logic being bad scholarship, it flies in the face of equality and liberty.  You cannot be a mainstream success by focusing on what you cannot do. This is why “disability art” will forever be on life support from the government. It is not the conditions into which you were born that define who you are. In fact, they don’t even make you interesting. Instead, your actions make you who you are. Ms. Boyle could have captured disability culture if she said, “Oh well, this is the best I’ll be. Let me define myself as disabled and sell a few records off the sympathy of others.” She could have compromised her vision and had it much easier. But she didn’t.

She captured the world instead. 

Conservatives are supposed to conserve. That’s what the name implies. The idea that we can create something (like energy) and have little-to-nothing left over is a great idea. Moreover, it’s a fantastic challenge to men’s minds, the type of problem which made us create the light bulb in the first place. It is the battle such as men literally fighting against the darkness which has called on the great mind of men to become even greater. And with new sources of energy came quite literally new ways of thinking.

The problem for me is when people demand either energy perfection or utter darkness. Last month, the UK decided to have a ‘blackout hour’ where everyone turned off everything to “vote earth.” The notion of it enraged me, probably more than I should have let it. I think it’s the idea that we solve our problems by going backwards and literally sitting in the dark ages which I find disturbing. When did we ever solve our problems by sitting in darkness and turning away from the issue rather than facing it full on?

Actions such as willfully stopping your life one night to “save the planet” is like crediting an apple for coming up with the laws of gravity. Isaac Newton did all the work years before that apple even came down. Had Newton not tinkered about in the lab, obsessed on his problem, revised, edited, and thought again, that apple would have been nothing more than a headache. Laboratories cannot make a better lightbulb while sitting in the darkness, they need to see what they are doing.

But Athena, you say, I’m not a lab. Can’t I do my part to save the earth by not using any energy at all?

Um, no, actually, it doesn’t work that way. 

See, how many hours of energy and pollution are you willing to give up to save the planet? If you can do that much good by giving up an hour than why not do an hour a week, or five hours per day? How many of your working hours are you willing to give up before you cease to exist? Stopping your life, regardless of whether you’re a judge or a janitor, is not going to make the world a better place. Shrinking and darkening your world is not going to make the earth any more fair. And a vote against the extraordinary tools produced by men’s minds is never a vote for the planet. It is a step toward destruction, and it is robbing us of your gifts and talents.  

Show me a better light bulb and I’ll buy it. Give me a carbon neutral cab that I can get into and I’ll hail it. But these things are not going to just appear while we’re sitting in the dark worrying about what damage we are doing to the environment. Keep using, keep going… keep thinking, even if it means keeping the lights on to read at night.

Dated: February 3, 2009

By the time Sunday night rolled around, you could no longer see Canary Wharf from our flat. Stealing out in the dark to buy a loaf a bread for dinner, the huge flakes of snow fell faster and with less timidity, sticking to the pavement rather than dissolving. And by morning it had covered our city so thoroughly that nothing was moving - no buses, no trains, no taxis. The great city of London was immobilized by Mother Nature.

Growing up in Chicago means having childhood memories of it truly being too cold to snow, or waking up to go to school through 30 inches of snow that fell overnight. So when making my way to the docks on Monday morning to catch a ferry boat downtown, the last thing I expected was a call from my boss.

“Walking in a winter wonderland… Hey whatcha doing?”

“I’m getting onboard a boat to go to work. Why?”

“A boat! I can’t get in without skis or something!”

“So go get your skis.”

“No, I mean I’m going to have to cancel work today. I can’t get in.”

Really? Eight inches of snow and the city was just going to stop?  Yes. For two and a half days there have been no stores open or garbage collected. It’s like a blackout, after the first 20 minutes the novelty wears off and the entire situation feels as if you’re permanently stuck a surrealist painting where all of man’s problem solving abilities have gone the way of the melting clocks. The snow becomes an excuse for everything, and anyone who wishes to take a long weekend without notice is free to do so. Nothing is going to get done for the next week. And those of us who need to get work done can’t do a single thing about it, even after arguing with the people who are supposed to keep us on track. 

A few cups of hot cocoa later and I’m no closer to finding anyone who wishes to be functional today. I pull on my Scottish wool sweater, so thick my mom disdainfully calls it ‘the rug,’ to head outside. Snow continues to fall as I step out onto my balcony feeling like some sort of Arctic Juliet. Two families from India wave up to me from down below. “What is…” a seven year old son begins. He is just starting to learn English. Even if his vocabulary was a bit larger he most likely wouldn’t be able to indentify the concept of snow. He has most likely never seen it. And before I can stop, I hear myself replying, “it’s snow!! Hang on one sec, I want to show you something!.” And I make my way downstairs and outside.

The best days never go as planned. God just seems to throw your Palm Pilot out the window and bring in his own agenda. And although I can’t help but worry about  how little we try in the face of adverse conditions, I will not do so anymore today. This was the day that I taught six boys from three different countries how to have a proper snowball fight and how to build a respectable snowman. And in some sense, it has probably been my most productive day this year.

When I considered moving yet again this summer, it was going to be closer to the  middle of the city. I have moved every year for the past 6 summers; thus, I am thinking that the time has come yet again to put everything I own in two suitcases and continue my life as a MASH unit. There was a point in time when I had moved 9 times over 2 years, so I am accustomed to being a hermit crab. With Spring rolling around, I began to look at the real estate pages in the paper. 

The flat where I live now has forced me to become a bit more tied down than I’m generally willing to be. It was the first flat I rented that was unfurnished (a dreaded word in a young renter’s vocabulary), which mostly translates to “you’re stuck here for at least two years now that you’ve invested in the place.”  A better offer may not come along, and if it does, it’s “til end of lease do us part,” and that’s if you find movers you can afford.

I’m not married. I have no children, no family on this side of the ocean, and I do freelance work. I ought to be able to pick up and move whenever I want. I started to do a mental inventory on what I’d have to do to move. There’s the bed my best friend and I put together, the desk and the dresser Anna and I assembled by ourselves when she came over from Boston to help me move. There are six paintings, given to me by a friend as a thank you gift, and hung by her in the bedrooms. The ramp someone built so I could go out onto my patio by myself would have to be thrown away. And we would have to tear out the make-shift electrical outlet that a great guy friend and I made when I needed a place to plug in my chair on the other side of the room, where there was no outlet before. (We argued about politics the entire time we set up the electric cord.) 

A year ago, I was panicked about how I would turn the flat I had just rented into a home, seeing as I was unable to move a stick of furniture by myself. Now I see the loving and almost miraculous way that it was done. There are still bits and bobs I want to change, like I still don’t have a microwave or a coffee table. But every detail that is here, I’ve seen it completed, and it reminds me of someone who has help me before and would be willing to do so again. All of the sudden, I begin to feel a little like I have a weird urban family that invests in me and I invest in them. I begin to feel a little more tied down, a little bit more established, and a little bit okay with that. 

I close the newspaper and my roommate pours me a cup of coffee. It’s from the local market where the Nigerian woman sells it. Every time I visit the coffee lady, she laughs at me and tells me to get a boyfriend. I think it’s the best coffee in the city. I smile and look around the flat, then head outside to the patio and watch the boats on the river. I love the view, and I love all the history I can see from my own window. And though I have absolutely no investment expertise and no market experience, I suddenly decide that real estate prices will be much lower if I wait until next year to move.

Dear Sir,

I think there is a big difference between wanting a lot of money, and wanting to earn a lot of money. To earn a lot of money means that there is some sort of trade taking place: it’s my cash for your late nights at the drawing board, the legal paperwork that you waded through, and the immense problem solving ability that you’ve harnessed. And I’ll pay for that, no problem. In my mind, greed is when you think that you are entitled to a lot of money, yet you have done nothing to earn it.
When you were little, did you want to have a lot of money or did you want to earn it?

Frankly, I’m not sure which it was you wanted. Don’t get me wrong, I think contract law reigns supreme and if it says in your contract that you get x amount in bonuses with no strings attached, then get it you shall. But lately, you haven’t been acting like leaders. You have thought you were entitled to get the money, regardless if it came from the market or from the government. Greed happens at every economic level as soon as someone reaches out his hand and says, “You have and I have not. But I’m entitled to what you’ve earned simply because I exist.” It’s not because you are rich that you are greedy, its just that right now you don’t care to earn anything when you can get it from the government for free. You are lazy. Greed is not determined by your bank account, it is determined by your actions.   

The system only works when you guys actually act like leaders and actually earn something. If you don’t want to take that risk, then step down and don’t renew your contract. Most of us wouldn’t want to risk it. But I hope there aren’t too many of us who would think that not earning the money also means that we don’t get the money. Stand up straight and be accountable for your actions. And if you can do that, then when the government “recommends” that you step down, don’t! Government and collectivism got us into this mess; it’s going to take strong individuals to get us out. 

You are not a capitalist. You are not a baron of industry. I don’t think its my job to figure out what you actually call a piece of post modern mish mosh like yourself, so I’ll save myself the trouble. But you are certainly not a leader. What did you want to be when you were young? Capitalism didn’t fail you. You failed yourself. 

And stop thinking that it’s too late to get yourself out of the problem because it’s not too late. As long as you have a combination of breath and spirit running through you, it is never too late to improve your condition. Pull at life with both hands, make this world into your image, look at the problem full in the face and think every way you can past it. Yes, it means lying in bed thinking; it may even take thinking about a problem that hasn’t been solved before. That’s OK. The best things in life are usually made from a combination of obsession, thought, and achievement. 

Don’t go to the government and expect support - that is taking money which you did not earn from those who did. Act like leaders and take risks. Earn as much as you can. 

“Hello, remember Gandhi? When are folks gonna realize that kicking young people off trains is a bad idea? It can only lead to trouble.”  - Athena Stevens

“Sorry, we can’t get you this one either,” he says to me for the third time in a row. It’s rush hour in London, a time that can only be classified as every man for himself. It’s a phenomenon which I can’t even complain about as, during the hours of seven to ten in the morning, I’m as savage as any of my ablie-bodied peers and nearly twice as fast. The past three years have given me a post doctorate degree in defensive driving. I weave in and out of bodies better than most footballers looking for a breakaway. Morning rush hour leaves no excuse to be late as the best thing you can do is pick up your feet and keep moving, 

Unless you are reliant on public transit. 

“Why not?” I contest back to the rail worker. “Seems to me there’s enough room to get on.”

“No, no. We need to wait for the next train. People like you really shouldn’t be out  and about during this hour anyway.”

There it is. I was wondering when I was going to find the arrogant chink in his seemingly paternal armor. I wasn’t supposed to be going to work with half the city of London. What possible appointment could I have at this time of day which would be of any importance? Why would I have a schedule to keep so tight that I actually spent my own money to buy a more expensive ticket to travel during the peak periods of the day? What could it even matter if I was late for work? 

Transit is a very strange business to be in. The things that can go awry while going from point A to point B is almost infinite once you add the Human Element. The idea is simple enough,  but in the process of trying to get everyone where they want to go, transportation has become the battleground which nearly always precedes the war of social justice. When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus, she challenged the whole of the American racial hierarchy. When Gandhi was thrown off a South African train, it caused one man to shift his entire world view, thereby shifting the world. And in the 1970’s the disability rights movement began by people chaining themselves to London busses in order to demand equal access. Clearly, we’re still in the trenches on that one.  

History should have taught us by now, refusal to give people reliable transport is a surefire way to start trouble. 

“Put me on this train now, please,” I slowly say between clinched teeth desperately trying to rail in my temper.   “I need to get to work.” He doesn’t move. The train passes. I am now officially late. 

The movement towards civilization has been founded on the movement of people  getting to where they want to go. Without the rails, roads, the very veins of the city our opportunities are limited to what’s just past our front door. For many, this limitation continues to be unmoved. In a world where we assume that just because there’s a little wheelchair symbol on the map means that everything is accessible, we forget that attitudes often stand more immovable than any concrete barrier. 

“So where do you work sweetie?” He’s trying to get on my good side. I’m now trying to call my boss. 

“I’m a consultant for the transit system here in town.” The truth slipped out so easily that it almost sounded sarcastic. 

“I bet we can get you on the next train.”

Yeah, funny how that works. 

As the next train rolled up he put down the ramp with a smile, and I thanked him by name. The outside began to flash past in an ever increasing cadence. I was on my way and almost on time. I thought about how far this world had to go in learning to accept the frailty of the human condition. It is a place that no motor will take us, save the drive that comes from knowing that all men are made equal;  the ones who have refused to forget that, even while simply commuting, have done a great deal to change the world. 

By the time I had opened my fourth wedding invitation in one week, I was convinced my life was over. I was going to die single, alone, with flowered wallpaper in my flat. I would be at some point in my mid sixties and having a successful career as an actuary. Because I was an actuary, I would be able to calculate the chances of  dying on that particular day and, realizing that  my odds were increased, I would have laid myself out in the wedding dress I bought at 30 and waited for Death. Of course, what I would’ve forgotten to consider would be my nine cats. Who, after going three days without food, would begin to eat my face. 

Why is it we are told to always plan ahead? In our freshman year of high school we were told to start thinking about colleges. At college we were told to on the first day to consider our options for graduate schools. And for my masters, I have to come up with a five year plan for my career, which to me sounds vaguely like Stalinist Russia. And I know whatever I say, be it I want to be married by 35 or I plan to be complete my masters within the standard two years, God will just laugh.

The irony of planning ahead is, of course, when things don’t go according to plan we feel like failures. It’s like the more we know about the path we feel that we have to take, the less confident we are in the direction we are going when we get blown off course. As a disabled person I can’t live alone, but I have no idea who I’m living with after May.

“This is why you need a manslave,” my friend begins. She’s been engaged for just under a year and I’m planning her wedding. I feel like she has her next five years planned out, but then again, she’s calling from Russia.  

“I’ve got my own company. That’s kinda like having a husband and a baby all rolled into one.  I just worry if this deal doesn’t go through and the company folds, I’m going to have to live in a nursing home and play card games all day. Maybe I’d be better off doing that though.”

“You wouldn’t. You can’t even hold the cards.”

Days like this, I’m in freak-out mode at full force. Life seems too long, an endless series of events and unforeseen occurrences that I can’t begin to plan for. Who will be cooking my dinner a year from now? What if I never find an agent? What will I do when my wheelchair dies now that the company has quit making the kind I need? What if I think I find someone, and he leaves me one night with no help? 

I can’t see past the next hour at this point. And I am well on the road to driving myself to the funny farm. So I do the one thing I know how to do. I go to the pub. 

Another friend is there and he asks me how I am. I’m fine, just like everyone else these days. 

“That good huh? Spill it.” He’s known me for over five years, and is therefore one of my oldest friends in the city. Which means he’s earned the right to hear.  Everything.  Even the bit about the cats eating my face.

“…And then I think about I have nothing to worry about so I shouldn’t feel bad. So of course then I feel worse and worry even more that I’m going crazy.”  By the time I’m done my friend has every right to bolt. 

“Well, that’s certainly logical,” he states, looking at me.

“How?” I can’t help but challenge him on this one. 

“Because no one can see that far ahead in any sort of detail. Really Athena, looking ahead further than next month is always overwhelming to those of us who are among the living. It’s just like acting. We stay in the moment because it’s all any of us can do.  It’s got nothing to do with your disability. We can’t hardly take in the now fully. There’s too many variables to try and figure out five years from now.”

Oh. 

On my way back home I make my way down to the docks to wait for the next ferry. It’s cold and I have no idea when the next boat’s coming. Maybe I missed the last one. My mind reels off again. I think about everything I want to do this year. How I want to direct Macbeth and Our Town back to back. The two together would provide an interesting death and rebirth of innocence. After that, I want to call in a new movement teacher for a workshop and perhaps start a new study on neurology and Alexander Technique…

The boat is just visible on the eastern edge of the Thames. Its bow light echoing on the surface of the water, grows stronger with  each passing minute, oblivious to the blackness that it pushes through. It’s beautiful in a way I’ve never noticed before. And I think of what the Stage Manager says of Emily at the end of Our Town when the young woman asks if anyone every really sees the beauty of the world while still alive. And the Stage Manager says “No. The saints and poets, maybe they do some.”

And then I smile at how we’re all are straining away do live life, that we forget that life is never well planned. And it was never meant to be.

In the list of the few teachers I didn’t get along with, there has been one name that has come back to my mind in recent months. He was loud, obnoxious, and arrogant, always interrupting students the second we got off course. He used to strut, yes strut, in front of a classroom full of seventeen year-olds, waiting to write the next discussion point on the board. Looking back, he was the only teacher I remember from high school who dared to grade papers in red pen. I’m sure I had more teachers like him, but this Economics teacher was fiercely Capitalist, supremely self-righteous, and made Ayn Rand look like a soccer mom. 

These days, I wish he taught kindergarden. 

Why do we insist on not teaching our children the basics of Economics? In between the Maths, Sciences, and Phonics, all the building blocks which are supposed lead to a full functioning member of society, there is no time to learn about the basic bedrock of what holds society together: money. The word problems in arithmetic class aren’t enough. “Sally sells seashells at seventy cents” only serves to teach young people the value of numbers, not the value of money. We give them no concept about how taxes work or how money stabilizes a society until they a practically full fledged members themselves, and even then the value of money is rarely discussed. In the affluent public schools we teach that charity is done by giving money away, not by acting on the problem. We teach to give to the poor without question, rather than teaching that even alms can be an investment. And in doing all this we teach that the best way to solve a problem is by throwing more money at it, rather than seeing where the money is already going.

This form of financial education only serves to create a bigger schism between classes. We divide the world into haves and have nots, keeping the latter dependent on the former. Resentment naturally becomes a two way street.

There is a common thought, I suppose, that often leads young people astray in the first place: “Let kids be kids,” we say, rightfully protecting the innocence of youth.  But there comes a point where a chick has to battle with his own strength against the reality of the shell protecting him. If you break the egg for him, the chick never develops his own strength and dies in a relatively short  time. To intentionally keep a child ignorant about the basics of life represents a grave failure as a parent.

If you think I’m overreacting, I’ll make it concrete. I recently spoke with a young woman who is currently getting her masters. She graduated from one of the top liberal arts colleges a few years ago at the top of her class. And she was horrified to learn that when she makes a deposit in the bank, the actual cash doesn’t just sit there until she is ready to take it out. She didn’t understand what it meant to be FDIC insured and had never heard of some stocks going up in a recession.

How is it this student went to some of the best schools in the world and managed to miss this information not only in Economics class but also in History, Math, Government, Art History…

We should be teaching the basic principals of saving, credit, and interest from the day children are able to understand that money exists. We should be teaching teenagers how to follow investments in a mock stock exchange competition. And nobody should be allowed to graduate high school without knowing how to do taxes, set up a long term savings account, and handle APR. Failure to do so creates a system that combines two of the most crippling elements in the world: fear and guilt. Fear, from not knowing how to handle money, and guilt from having it in the first place. 

My teacher was a man who, sadly, didn’t have many of the qualities a good teacher has. I’m sure he drove the school administration nuts. (More power to him for that!) But he understood the fact that if people didn’t appreciate and even respect the value of money from a young age, economic chaos was certain. 

As I remember this teacher’s behavior whenever a student finally conceded that he was right, I hope we don’t give him a chance to strut during this modern economic period.