A student comes to my office.
“I think I will drop this class,” he says. “There is too much other stuff going on, so I think I should just drop.”
“Do you realize that you missed the deadline to withdraw without being charged for the course?” I ask.
“Oh, I don’t care,” the student waves his hand dismissively. “The state of Illinois pays for all that.”
The student is maybe a little younger than I am but not by a lot.
Who do you think he votes for?
Is he a Republican? I have found that those who vote Republican are more apt to abuse government services–partly because they have this paranoid fantasy that everyone abuses state aid so they “might as well too.”
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right winger.
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Unrelated….Yankee Doodles:
http://gawker.com/black-person-in-yoga-class-causes-profound-moral-crisis-1510975100
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The essay at XO Jane reminds me of a movie I saw recently, Please Give, in which there’s a woman who feels guilty about her job. She buys ugly furniture from the estates/homes of people who have just passed away and resells them at a much higher price to people who think such furniture is trendy. She feels like a vulture and feels guilty for being wealthy. So she tries to assuage her guilt by ‘giving’ to people.
She’ll see a black man standing outside a restaurant, assume he’s homeless, and go up to him and offer him some money for food; only, he isn’t homeless and has his own money, thank you very much. She’ll go volunteer with senior citizens, only she can’t stand how old and frail they are, and how relatively young and able-bodied she still is; the pain is too much for her to bear, she can’t be around them. She tries to volunteer with people who have Down’s Syndrome, and the way they play basketball is so pitiful to her she goes and cries in the restroom at the gym where they’re playing, and one of the women with Down’s Syndrome is concerned and asks her if she’s OK.
She can’t see anyone she tries to help as anything more than an object of pity, a victim who is perpetually sad and down-trodden, and this guilt she feels for being different from them is so much of a burden…
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I sentence her to a year of hard labor.
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“I sentence her to a year of hard labor.”
No, that’s too difficult. Give her something she can flagellate herself with. But not a cat o’ nine tails; give her a bathrobe belt that she can hit herself with, while telling herself with each soft, caressing blow that she’s a bad bad person who deserves every moment of this torture.
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“But not a cat o’ nine tails; give her a bathrobe belt that she can hit herself with, while telling herself with each soft, caressing blow that she’s a bad bad person who deserves every moment of this torture.”
– You are brilliant. 🙂
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It’s a trick question. Regardless of the student’s political leaning or eligibility to vote, the student probably doesn’t vote. At all.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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