fits the fresh new stereotype of a 20-something recent grad living in their parents’ basement. Indeed, one of the Philly protesters on Monday was 66-year-old Irving Jones of West Oak Lane, who borrowed cash in their middle-years to earn two master’s degrees at the University of the Arts and a Philadelphia seminary, and still owes $203,000. He said he’s never been able to find work that would bring in enough money for all the dollars he borrowed. “I couldn’t keep up,” Jones conceded. “I wasn’t working for a lengthy period.”

But while there are 45 million Americans who still owe student debt, you are likely to hear almost as many arguments as to the reasons huge loan forgiveness was a negative suggestion – either morally or politically, or for some other reason. Absolving everyone who took on debt to get an education is grossly unfair, critics argue, to those who never ever lent currency in the first place or who worked diligently to pay their loans off. And what about the 63% of American adults who never earned a four-year degree – what is with it in their mind?

But for the debtors who took part in Monday’s protest and their allies, college-debt forgiveness on a massive scale is the first step toward more substantial personal objective – treating higher education not as an individual crucible but as a public good that benefits everyone, by creating better-told residents and more productive workers.

“Markets logic doesn’t have an area in higher-education policy,” Clancy said, noting that his friends and co-workers went into social work to help their neighbors, but instead got walloped with a huge bill that’s all on them. It is a strong argument, but advocates like the Debt Collective know they face an uphill battle and are already planning their next move if Biden does reinstate the payments in May: a personal debt hit.

“It’s nothing like ‘This new Silent Generation,’” Deigh said of her younger allies in the movement. “They will do something about it. He or she is brave.”

Yo, do that

I’ve been harping a lot title loans Cordova in this space about how all of our boomer-day and age coaches never taught united states the truth about post-Civil War Reconstruction. The same is true, I now know, about ladies suffrage plus the nineteenth Amendment, thanks to a great new season from one of my favorite podcasts, American History Tellers from Wondery. The saga of the women who finally won the vote in 1920 is a morally state-of-the-art you to definitely – mixing remarkable courage with occasional bouts of demoralizing racism against both Black people and immigrants. I didn’t know before listening to this AHT series how close (one vote, in one state, Tennessee) the 19th Amendment came to meeting the same condemned future as the 1970s’ Equal Rights Amendment.

Meanwhile, the documentarian Ken Burns (the hardest working man in show business since James Brown left us) is here this week with his very Philadelphia jawn ever, a two-parter on another complicated slice of Americana, Philly’s own Benjamin Franklin. The series launched Monday night but you can stream it on and catch the second part live Tuesday night on WHYY 12 at 8 p.m. You should also read the super-cool op-ed that Burns co-wrote for The Inquirer, in which he called the series “a biography made jagged with the latest sharp edges of your own insights.”

Ask me some thing

Concern: What is Putin’s endgame in Ukraine, and what happens if it eventually becomes clear that Russia will not gain territorial control there? – Via Andrew Benowitz () on Twitter

Answer: Andrew, it seems clear that the next 30 days or so could be decisive – leading up to May 9, which is when reports suggest Vladimir Putin got grandiose visions of celebrating a sweeping victory in Ukraine on the anniversary of the USSR’s 1945 triumph over Nazi Germany. And the key battleground will be the regions in the east of Ukraine such as Donbas that the Russian dictator insisted was their genuine goal most of the collectively – even as his troops were getting whupped in greater Kyiv. Putin might take territorial gains in the east – which is rich in energy resources – and call it a day, leaving the rest of Volodymyr Zelensky’s Ukraine intact. But new planet’s growing anger over Russian war crimes makes it less likely other nations will let Putin be “the decider” of the conflict.