I keep having to scold on-side, well-intentioned people:
you’re afraid to protest political correctness and other evils on the job and so forth — because you don’t want to lose your dental insurance.
The time has come to choose between your children’s crooked teeth and your children’s crooked minds.
My teeth were crooked, horribly so, my whole life. My upper lip caught on one of my teeth. Every. Time. I. Spoke. But braces were a bougeouis luxury item.
When I turned forty, I couldn’t take it anymore and put my own goddam braces on my own goddamn credit card; they weren’t covered by my then-dental plan anyhow.
Sometimes I still reflexively raise my hand to my mouth when I laugh. I hated hated hated the way I looked.
But I lived.
Your kids will live, too. They might even get something better than straight teeth: respect for their mom or dad for calling “bullshit” on the latest bullshit.
(This is why I’m not 100% on board with the “let’s all have kids to reverse the demography freefall” thing. Having kids turns too many people into sucky sellouts. “Even” conservatives use their kids and some catastrophized imaginary future as an excuse to stay lazy, conformist cowards.)
Now here’s an example, from the left. You call yourself a conservative, but be brutally honest: do you sound like this broad?
Come on. Life is too short and we’re running out of time as it is.
Have some balls.
The game of finding someone to pin the blame on for the US housing market collapse has gone on long enough. Are the bankers responsible? The analysts who didn’t see it coming? The McMansion mums who bought homes that they couldn’t afford?
No. I did it. It was me.
In 2003, I worked for one of those well-meaning organisations that promoted home ownership in low-income communities. Our line – like that of hundreds of non-profit organisations across the US – was that people who bought their own homes could gain increased financial security, freedom from the landlord … the American dream.
But I was not like the people running the organisation. I knew full well that buying a house could be a financial time bomb. I hadn’t drunk the home-ownership-leads-to-prosperity Kool-Aid. But I had drunk enough cola to rot my teeth. I led people down the road to financial collapse – and I did it for the dental insurance.
(…)
So, like any good leftie from a privileged background, I started my job search on idealist.org, where I ran across a posting for an associate position at an Individual Development Account programme in Los Angeles.
(…)
Yet people’s finances were worse than I had imagined. Few of our clients even approached the income cap. They tended to have a lot of debt. Encouraging people who had so little to buy what to me was clearly overpriced property was unconscionable, I thought. I decided to quit. I would load up my car and drive back to DC, consequences be damned.
Two weeks after I had started my job, I would take the same type of principled stand that had got me arrested at a protest in the lead-up to the Iraq war, except this time it wouldn’t be futile. I would live my ideals. Of course, this was all in my mind. In reality, my teeth hurt.
(…)
But since I was a new employee, I wouldn’t qualify for dental insurance for another three months.
I started giving the financial education classes…
