IN DEFENSE OF AMERICAN YOUTH

To NFO and those who agree with his recent post:

I realize you're reprinting what someone else said, but because you and a number of other people seem to be in agreement that this post is excellent, I feel I must say something about it. My daughter is a 25-year-old graduate student. Although she's not part of occupy Wall Street, she does attend the University of California at Berkeley.

I don't care for the generalization and the implication that "America's youth" does not care about or support the military. My child is the granddaughter of a veteran of World War II, the granddaughter of a veteran from the time of the Korean Conflict, the niece of a Gulf War veteran, and the daughter of a veteran. If any child was brought up to appreciate the military, she was.

I am particularly offended by the following statement: "The 99 percent demands that the government pay back their student loans, often for expensive degrees in academic fields not adequate to compete in today’s tough employment market."

When my daughter was an undergraduate student, she worked as a server in a Chinese restaurant, tutored students, and worked as a mentor for math classes. She has paid for her entire education on her own. She did not even accept my offer of money to pay for her textbooks each semester. Yes, she has student loans, but she knows she'll be paying them back. She certainly does not have a $300 phone. She now gets by on fellowships, and by teaching and tutoring.

The protests on the Berkeley campus frighten my daughter; however, she is not afraid of the protesters. She is afraid of the police, who injured a 70-year-old Pulitzer Prize winning poet, among other innocent people. She stays away from the part of campus where the protesters are to make sure she isn't pepper sprayed or beaten, although she has done nothing wrong and the protesters are peaceful.

As for her expensive degrees that supposedly might leave her unable to compete in the job market, as an undergraduate she majored in mathematics and physics. She graduated first in her class. Her closest friends majored in chemistry, biology, pre-med . . . all fields in which American students have trouble competing with their counterparts from European and Asian countries. After going to class and working at one or two jobs, she stayed up until 2 a.m. to study -- every night -- and graduated with the highest grade point average in her class.

Although she attended a small Midwestern liberal arts school, she was accepted to the Ph.D. program in mathematics at Berkeley. She deferred for a year to get the equivalent of a master's degree in mathematics from Cambridge University. Now in her third year at Berkeley, she works nearly non-stop to be at the top of her field. She rarely takes a day off. She visited me for three days last spring and worked on her mathematics at least part of every day during her visit.

Do you really think that you'll be flying new and improved jets without students such as my daughter? Or do you prefer that the improvements to technology in America come from other countries? We need mathematicians, physicists, chemists, engineers, computer scientists; and she and her friends are receiving excellent educations in these fields.

The writer of your post uses "let's feel sorry for the military" logic to attack the so-called 99%. Well, my daughter and her friends are not part of the 99%, and they are not part of the 1% in the military. Does this make them non-existent?

I don't want to see the military's budget cut, but if it is, it is not the fault of the students who are working so hard to get an education so they can be America's future.

I will not sit back and allow anyone to portray my daughter and the students with whom she works as free-loaders receiving useless educations.

Infinities of love to my daughter and so many other excellent students,

Lola


P.S. And on a lighter note, I want to recommend a blog I should have told you about sooner: Paige Kellerman -- There's More Where That Came From.
 Paige is so funny I almost hate her. Nobody should ever be funnier than I am, but she does it consistently (I'm a little competitive). Paige is merely funny some weeks and other weeks she's almost pee my pants funny, my stomach hurts funny, and I'm afraid I'll fart and blush in the presence of my gentleman friend funny.