Speaker for the Living

2Aug/090

Good luck finding a job, Trina Thompson

Especially with the history of suing your former associations like this.

I am not sure where she got the idea that the college was obliged to provide her with a job. The tuition she paid was in exchange for classes. If she found classes useful when she took them, then the college fulfilled their obligation. If she didn't find them useful, well, maybe she should've dropped out or changed majors (as far as I know, no classes at any college is offered "satisfaction guaranteed").

This story is an amalgam of two different cancers of American society which could eventually kill us: litigiousness and death of individualism. Would it have occurred to anybody, say, 50 years ago, to sue McDonalds because eating their food made you fat (supposedly) or to sue colleges because you didn't develop useful marketable skills while you were there? The frivolousness and absurdity in these cases test the limits of our sense of fairness. The plaintiffs suffered no meaningful injustice at the hand of the defendants, and the defendant doesn't deserve any of this: definitely not a judgment against them, and perhaps not even the cost of defending themselves.

Perhaps this litigiousness is, in part, related to the death of individualism. Someone who understands her role as an individual in a society would understand what her duties are and when she failed to achieve it—with no one else to blame. She would have understood that she had a choice in where to eat, and therefore getting fat was her fault, not McDonald's. She would have understood that she had a choice in majors, classes, and experiences (internship, research, etc.) she could have while in college, so she wouldn't have been so quick to blame the college for non-employment: after all, assuming she started looking in the spring semester for a job, she hasn't looked for 1 year yet!

Something has to be done about these two phenomena. Maybe it will take the form of tort reform, and maybe it will take an education campaign. I don't know exactly what it'll take (because whatever it is, it has to be Constitutional; it can't be a tyrannical president or federal government telling what people can and can't do), but if we don't do something about these ... signs of decay, one day, they will be the cause of our downfall.

Pages

Categories

Blogroll

Archive

Meta