It is true. 

Long ago, people lived forever, and when they were done with everything they had wanted to do, they would take a bus to Bognor Regis, on the English south coast, and sleep in small seaside bed and breakfast hotels. They would spend the days walking along the seafront, possibly crunching along the shingle. Hundreds of them to begin with, but eventually millions, and then millions of millions. Needless to say, Bognor Regis became uncomfortably crowded, and there was nowhere to buy an ice cream or even a postcard. All of the Bed and Breakfasts had “No Vacancies” signs up. 

I was only a boy, but I could see that this was untenable. “What if,” I suggested, “We make it so that instead of going to Bognor by bus, people who have finished just stop existing, and rot down. And what if we make it so it’s always been like this?”

“You are seven years old,” they said to me. “It will be many years before you take the bus to Bognor. Why do you let this bother you?”

“Because this is not tenable,” I told them. It was a big word I was proud of knowing and I used it whenever I could. “By that time the town will be so full that I will have to sleep on the pebbled beach at night, or even in the road. It will not be a good thing.”

I showed them my drawings, which included suggestions for how death would work, and stressed that for it to be successful it would also need to apply to everything else as well. Not just people.

“Even cats?” they asked.

“Even cats,” I told them.

“The cats won’t like that,” they said. But the cats thought it was going to be great, and explained to us that they had plans for the mice and the birds under the proposed system, and my invention caught on. These days almost nobody remembers what it was like before.

...

And then the hero goes home, and finds home a smoking desolation, his neighbors turned on one another, that secondary villain no one finished off having destroyed Frodo’s last oasis not even out of evil so much as spite, and then that villain dies pointlessly, and then his killer dies pointlessly. The hero is left not with a cathartic homecoming, the story come full circle in another party; he is left to pick up the pieces of what was and what shall never be again. 

And it’s not enough. The hero cannot heal, and so departs for the fabled western shores in what remains a blunt and bracing metaphor for death (especially given his aged companions). When Sam tells his family, “Well, I’m back” at the very end, it is an earned triumph, but the very fact that someone making it back qualifies as a triumph tells you what kind of story this is: one that is too honest to allow its characters to claim a clean victory over entropy, let alone evil. 

“I can’t recall the taste of food, nor the sound of water, nor the touch of grass. I’m naked in the dark. There’s nothing–no veil between me and the wheel of fire. I can see him with my waking eyes.”

But I get very upset when people are like “teachers and professors do these horrible things to torture us and make things impossible” when the things they’re talking about like course outcomes or attendance are not things the teacher or professor has any real control over. And I get especially upset when students in those situations don’t understand that making changes or leaving ourselves unprotected can cost us our jobs. No one goes into teaching on any level because it’s an easy cushy job. It’s physically and emotionally draining and it pays shit and unless you are tenured you can be fired for almost anything, even things you didn’t do, or school policy the university decides to throw on you, on things students or administrators lie about. A colleague who is an amazing caring brilliant teacher just got fired because an administrator told her he was going to overload her schedule but it was okay and he would clear it with the university. He never did and now he’s saying he never told her that and she lied to him and didn’t disclose she was teaching an extra section in another department last term. So the university has opted not to renew her contract. Not her fault. She did everything right, but because she didn’t get something ad writing and decided to trust and administrator instead of double checking on him, she’s out of a job. This shit happens all the time.

There seems to be an expectation that student interaction with a university is entirely mediated by their professors, but, given how the structure of a university has vastly changed in the past few decades, that is just not true.  It is a lot easier on the administration if they let students keep blaming individual teachers instead of the system itself though.  

Book Sculpture by Justin Rowe on Etsy

Browse more curated book art

Something else, that I feel like people really should be aware of is that our state government (led, of course, by Rick Snyder of the ongoing Flint Water Crisis) just stated that literacy is not a right.

Yeah.  Literacy is not a right.

What happened is that some students in Detroit tried to sue the state because they have been denied access to literacy (through disinvestment and indifference to Detroit’s public schools).  And the official response is that state legislation only requires that there be a system of free public schools.  So yeah, there are schools.  Schools without money or resources.  But they’re there, and literacy is not a right (apparently).

Meanwhile, Betsy DeVos is a huge supporter of charter schools.  Which means that she’s strongly anti-public school.  She never went to public school, nor did any of her children.