As the happy owners of several chickens, we’ve been finding that non-chicken-owners often have a comically flawed understanding of chicken anatomy and chicken reproduction. Specifically, people seem to assume that if a hen lays an egg, it implies that the egg contains an embryo, and definitely means that a chick will eventually hatch from the egg, unless the egg is taken from the hen and eaten before the embryo grows to a visible size. This assumption is maintained even when people are told that there’s no rooster in our flock, to which the response is “What does a rooster have to do with it?”
I remind my non-chicken-owning friends that a female human routinely produces eggs that fall out of her uterus. These eggs will never develop into a human embryo, unless they are fertilized by the human equivalent of a rooster.
I worked part-time while attending college (a decently mid-tier state school) in the early 2000s, and paid for the entirety of my tuition with my salary. I never took out any loans to pay for my education, and finished college without any debt. This is a choice that I made, and this choice is not for everyone. Despite this fact, I am overjoyed that many people will now have an easier time paying for college than I did, and I hold no resentment towards those people for whom the $10,000 loan forgiveness package will make a life-altering difference.
Thinking about it in the most abstract terms, the whole point of civilization is for the current generation to improve the quality of life for the next generation. Parents make sacrifices all the time to improve their children’s future, and good parents don’t resent their children just because their children’s lives are easier than theirs were.
The only minor annoyance I feel is that there’s still no attempt to fix the underlying root cause of the issue, which is twofold: 1) Colleges are experiencing unprecedented levels of administrative bloat, which is driving up the cost of education to the point where college is a luxury product that a seventeen-year-old is expected to purchase without thinking twice, and 2) We’ve created a culture which insists that going to college is the only way to succeed in life, when in fact there are a hundred different trades that are looking desperately for more people, and provide a very comfortable living and life satisfaction.