Student Loans and Sealing

A couple recent Stories from the Nanaimo Daily News that I thought I would comment on.

Students plead for a break on loan interest

Sealing awareness campaign will lack perspective

What can I say about student loans? If you are not the beneficiary of them then as you will read in the comments below the story linked above you may not understand the difficulty some people have in paying them back. Me, I graduated in 2002 with a Child & Youth Care degree and $56,000 in student loans. In a couple ways I was lucky; one being I had stopped getting loans in 2000, otherwise I would likely have owed over $70,000; two, I had been under the remission qualifier program which meant as long as I graduated in as timely manner I qualified. The latter resulted, upon my graduation and submission of paperwork, in a total forgiveness of my BC student loans to the tune of $22,000. Had this not happened I would have been required to pay over $700 a month in payments but as it is I now only have to pay $300 a month over a 15 year term. Despite having paid over $25,000 since 2002 I still owe another $22,000 so I figure that by the time the loan is paid off the bill will be well over $60,000 and possibly as high or higher than twice the original $34,000. I am one of the lucky ones in that I can somewhat afford to pay but I tell you it ain’t easy and because I am always late in my payments it has really screwed up my credit rating.

Sealing protests? I fully support the protesters and if you read Robert Barron’s story, I usually like what he has to say, and have even the slightest bit of intelligence you will be able to read between the lines. No one wants to stop indigenous peoples from hunting for their livelihood and that is not the wholesale slaughter that people are protesting against. Mr. Barron talks about the seal harvest as food but other than those taken by First Nations the vast majority of the carcasses are left t0o rot on the ice with their mothers having looked on while their babies were killed simply for their fur. Mr Barron then has the audacity to compare the killing of baby seals to humanities insatiable lust for McDonalds and Kentucky Fried Chicken.

“But killing animals for food, clothing and other uses has been an ongoing human activity since we first walked the plains of Africa millions of years ago and most of us, including many of the people who will attend Nanaimo's protest with Sparky, have no problems eating meat products or wearing leather. The anti-sealing groups have become very successful in their efforts to separate the seal hunt from the slaughter of pigs and cows that occur daily in abattoirs in every neighbourhood across Canada and the world by appealing to human emotions, rather than basing their campaign on hard, cold facts.”

Give me a freakin break Robert this is in no way even remotely the same and lest ye forget there are many animal rights groups that protest the way food is treated prior to becoming food. The killing of baby seals for monetary gain is plain and simply wrong.