This from Slate:
I Can’t Believe What My Daughter Wants to Do With Her College Fund
I am a single mom, and my 16-year-old Natalie is the light of my life. I want her to have a better life than I did, and that’s meant working two jobs, taking on overtime, and saving up for her college since she was little. I don’t have a lot of money, but with the money I’m saving, she should be able to attend an in-state public school without graduating with debt. Without those savings, I would not be able to afford to pay for her college and she’d probably have to take on student loans. Natalie recently came to me about her college fund. She said that she wants me to donate it all to her BIPOC friends as “reparations” and “wealth redistribution.” She’s always said that she wants to go to college, and she knows that it would otherwise be hard for her to afford it. Moreover, many of the friends in question come from affluent professional two-parent families. I haven’t touched the money, and I think that I should hold onto Natalie’s college fund until she’s 18. At that point, she can choose how she wants to spend it. Despite telling her that, she’s accusing me of being greedy and racist for not giving her friends that money. I understand where she’s coming from, but it feels disrespectful to my efforts over the years to help her. Am I wrong in wanting to hold onto her college fund?
I’d say this isn’t real but I’m sure it is from other stories I’ve seen from the popular culture.
Yesterday I said I refuse to buy into collective guilt.
This is what happens when someone doesn’t refuse (which is why I wrote this post).
This girl is lucky to have a single mother that had the means and wherewithal to save up for her to have a debt free college education.
The daughter doesn’t appreciate that and instead attacks her mother for not wanting to give that money away in a mea culpa to minorities for grievances she did not commit.
I actually feel sorry for this girl in a way. She has been emotionally abused and manipulated to turn against a loving mother that worked hard to give her a better future and turn towards an abusive ideology.
Does this girl think that for one second that if she did give away her college savings she’d be given absolution? Of course she won’t. The cult will demand more.
This is what they cult wants, for those who have to sacrifice everything in pursuit of absolution for past grievances.
That’s what makes this a cult. They know the people they are demanding sacrifices from are not responsible for the grievances so absolution will never be granted.
It’s just a sisyphean to appease a cult that will never be appeased.
Refuse or they will take everything from you, including your children and everything you do for them.
The only thing the cult leaders who abuse people like this deserve is a choice: the wall or the fall.
IIRC from nursing school, this sounds like magical thinking (i.e., if I think it, it will be so).
Even if giving away the money would (somehow) help, there will be no absolution. It’s sad that many people seem to feel this way.
I say mom takes a nice Caribbean cruise.
Or a down-payment on a little house she can afford so that when she is no longer able to work herself to death, she will have a place to live where the rent is not always going up. Or maybe get the medical or dental care she has been holding off on so that her daughter doesn’t do without. I’m a mom. I know what we do for our children. But the money was to help her daughter get a college education. Does her daughter think that BIPOC moms can’t or don’t do the same? That’s racist! She should read the biography of Dr. Ben Carson and be grateful her mother loves her.
It’s not the girl’s money, it’s Mom’s, saved for use on (not by) the girl. So I’d say … Use the fund to pay for the kid’s college (as planned) – if she chooses a major that can support her. Then when she graduates she can spend whatever fraction of her salary she wants on “reparations.”
At some point perhaps she’ll learn that paying people to like her never works after the money stops coming. And often not while it still is.
If this were my kid, I’d be showing off my new Corvette to the neighbors the very next day. And the kid could go to community college on their own.
Parties in the futures of the recipients !!!!!
It is always easy to spend other people’s money.
And this is why we’ve been steering our daughters into the skilled trades…
Eldest daughter is currently in a trade-focused high school and absolutely loving automotive mechanics and welding. She spent most of last night googling for median pay for a journeyman welder in various states. She’s thinking Alaska.
A qualified welder will always be in demand and can find work just about anywhere. If she gets certified in specialized techniques and/or welding special alloys, even better. Even with robots doing more and more production welding, someone has to do the setup and programing. Good luck to her.
She’s really enamored with the idea of homesteading on the outskirts of a small to midsize city in a rural state, e.g. Alaska, Idaho, Colorado… I figure a skilled welder / metalworker will be in demand there for a long while and even as robots become more and more common in those fields, it will be a while before they make it out to cattle country.
Welding robots working in a clean and sterile(ish) automotive assembly line is one thing. Getting those same robots to tromp across four hundred and ninety-five acres of muddy cow pasture to fix the busted worky-bit* on a sump pump is another story.
* That’s the technical term.