for love, love, love

I’m sure most of you are even more broke than me, but please hear me out and if you have a dollar - less than a dollar to give - I hope I can give you a reason to donate.

My name is Lau, I am seventeen years old. Some of you might know my blog from my angsty teenage poetry, most of you do not.

Recently I was accepted to my dream school in Europe, specifically Holland. My father, my number one supporter who has always told me I could do whatever I wanted, has told me that this might be unachievable.

The first term is $15,700 for tuition alone, projected yearly cost is $29,000 and scholarships aren’t plentiful in Holland, like. Less than 10 plentiful.

I was accepted for an international water management degree, I truly believe that access to water is going to get harder in my generation and that’s… Just not okay with me.

I don’t kid myself, I won’t be able to raise this money online, why would I? I write poetry but I’m not well known- I’m just a kid. But maybe I can raise something, just enough to pay for the first year, this is really my dream school I get the feeling that even just one year, with thousands of debt, would be a privilege. I set my goal to $5000 but honestly even that feels like a pipedream.

I’ve graduated highschool early with all A’s and B’s, I have a 3.7/4.5 GPA with college credits in Environmental and marine science. I don’t want money to be the reason I fail, I’ve had enough panic attacks over the years over money, I don’t want it to overcome me.

Please help me succeed. I will campaign for rights to water; I will change how we distribute water globally; I will repay. Please, please help me.

first and foremost i like that she held most of her progressive policy views before they were politically popular. she was basically the key architect of the consumer financial protection bureau  but obama picked someone else to head it after republicans said they would block her (for being too much of a scary liberal). when she ran for senate, massachusetts had never elected a female senator before and everyone thought her policies were too anti-business to win. in some ways (though, again, i don’t actually trust any politician to not play politics) i like her because i trust her more than the other candidates to not just cherrypick views from all parts of the political spectrum to be all things to all people (i think bernie sanders is kind of similar in this respect). i think in office she will do a combination of (a) trying to pick either the the most progressive policy that can feasibly win and (b) pushing policies that won’t win just to make them more mainstream.

more specifically here are some of her good policies: 

she wants to cancel nearly all student debt and make public colleges completely free 

people disagree as to whether federal-level solutions to housing are necessary or would create more problems. i happen to think we need national solutions to the housing crisis. she has the only robust housing reform right now. her proposed bill not only expands existing anti-discrimination provisions but also provides for 450 billion investment in affordable housing over 10 years. 

she was the first to call for breaking up big tech companies in an actually concrete, serious way

this should go without saying but surprisingly not everyone in the field has explicitly said mass incarceration is racist and she has.

she’s nominally on the right side of criminal justice reform but i think her pro Imprison CEOs stance can ultimately be dangerous in furthering the Prison Industrial Complex. 

oh also she’s explicitly addressed anti-black racism in health care.

her reading coretta scott king’s letter against jeff sessions unfortunately became more of a meme than a spotlight on opposition to sessions but it was still a good moment

[Image: A tweet from @akatookey, which reads: “funzies tip for my friends with medical debt; when collectors hound you, demand an itemized invoice. If they don’t give you one, you have grounds to contest the debt. If they do give you one, someone violated HIPAA and you can contest the debt.“]

Now here is some ding-danged useful information! Another user pointed out that over half of small debt collectors lack this information because they buy their debts in bulk for cheap and in return get really disorganized paperwork. They encourage folks to look up “debt validation letter” online to get more information on this.