My submission to OccupyStudentDebt.com

I have well over $22,000 dollars in student debt.

I have to pay $200 dollars a month just to keep it from going up any higher.

I am currently unemployed in a market with almost no employment opportunity. I am self-employed as a musician, which is sort of the same thing as being unemployed.

I've completely given up on life, or the idea that I'm going to have any sort of normal life worth living.

I've tried working full time to pay back my student loans, but the wages are just too low, the cost of living is too high, and I can't keep up with payments, and my debt just keeps ballooning thanks to compounding interest.

In fact, I just received a letter from my last employer, LL Bean, telling me about the great program they have connecting their employees with welfare services. That's right. They brag in this letter about connecting over 9,000 full time employees with welfare services. They know full well that they do not pay wages that are high enough for people to live on, such that over 9,000 of their full time employees are on WELFARE.


You know things are fucked up in this country when employers take putting their employees on state assistance for granted.

I just can't see how there is any way to escape, aside from just not paying my loans, and living a slightly less shitty life.

I would actually gladly default on my loan, because I have no money, no income, and cannot get loans as it is. Really how much worse could it be?

I have also considered committing suicide in the offices of those who hold my student debt as protest.

But there's problems with both of these:

The first problem is that I owe money to three separate institutions, and can only kill myself once.


The second problem is that my parents are cosigners on most of my loans, and even if I'm dead, they still will continue to owe a mountain of debt that I cannot pay.

I can't even escape my student debt through death.

How fucked up is that?

Default: The Student Loan Documentary

In the film “Network” the protagonist, Howard Beale’s makes a to arms: “First you’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say, ‘I’m a human being goddammit-- my life has value!’ I want you to get up now, I want all of you to get up out of your chairs, go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell, ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!’”

If you’re like me, you’re a twenty something who has gone to college in the USA, and are currently trying to pay thousands of dollars of student loans, have been in forbearance on multiple occasions, and have paid in interest the value of some of your loans multiple times over. You probably have floating around in your subconscious an unfocused notion that you and everybody you graduated with, everyone you work with, is getting swindled.

Default: The Student Loan Documentary draws on the stories of individuals like you, expert testimony, and simply runs the raw numbers to bring that unfocused notion into crystal clarity.

This film takes the elephant in the room that has been invisible right in front of our faces, and highlights it with neon orange spraypaint. YES you are getting swindled! YES our higher educational system is broken. YES the USA is becoming a debtors prison. YES it really was easier to get a college degree and a good paying job when your parents were your age. What’s more YES there is something you can do about it!

Just as Howard Beal’s call to arms rallied a nation, Default: The Student Loan Documentary has the potential to be a flashpoint for an entire generation to organize around. It is my hope that this film it will spawn a generation-wide economic justice movement.

Check the trailer: