I got my first freelance client today! I'm going to be doing transcription for a British company, and they're going to pay me in pounds sterling, and for the first time I am happy about the crappy standing of the US dollar, because with the exchange rate, 85 pence a minute really works out to be something like $1.25 a minute, and that's way better than American companies would pay me for the same amount of work. Now I just hope that I can do a really good job and knock their socks off, so that more good things will follow.

I was telling a friend of mine about the job and she did utter that phrase I was so afraid of, "But you aren't going to use your law degree?" And at first I got kind of defensive, but then I got kind of mad. Not at her, per se, but more at the world. Why is education necessarily seen as a stepping stone to a career? Why is learning not enough, for its own sake? Shouldn't the fact that I just wanted to learn be validation in itself for getting a degree? It's not like that in our society. What you know seems to only matter in what you can get out of it, financially, and I hate that.

And I think that the Almighty Dollar (and society's belief that it trumps all in this world) keeps people from pursuing the things in life that they might, otherwise. For example: I have an aunt who loves Elizabethan art and literature. But when it came time for her to declare her major in college, she majored in Management, because she thought she would never get a job with a BA in Literature. Now she's a telemarketer, and she hates it. Then there's my first college roommate, who I'd known since high school, who always wanted to major in Archaeology. But the same thing happened to her, and she did her degree in Information Systems, instead (What does that even mean?) She intended to get her minor in Anthropology, but she ended up not having the time, and let it slide. So her entire professional career, and almost the whole of her academic experience, was based around not what she really wanted to study, but something she only did because she needed to get a job when she graduated.

When I am trying to shock people (my mother), I tell them that I am a Socialist. And that's true to a certain extent: I do believe there are industries that are best maintained by the government, and so does the US, and so has the US since its inception. The military, for instance--I don't think anybody wants private markets writing off the lives of young men and women, as a sunk cost in oil retrieval operations. But on the other hand, I like things about capitalism. I like the free flow of information and ideas and goods and services. There is, though, the fact that the end goal in capitalism is for the most amount of money to be made in the shortest amount of time. And that single-minded mission is somewhat problematic for me.

Because in order for that to happen, exploitation has to happen in some form. I don't see it so much as a political statement as an economic fact. Take the example of a sugar plantation. ACME Sugar, Inc, wants to make the most amount of money in the shortest time period so they ignore procedure for maintaining the productivity of the land for a long time period, and they plant plant plant until the land is too depleted to use for sugar-farming anymore. Then they sell it to a mining company, and use the proceeds to buy more fertile land, elsewhere in the world. The land was exploited for capital gains.

I don't think people should be exploited for capital gains in the same way. I think people should have the ability to pursue things in life they want. You should be able to study Archaeology, and still get a job. In order to do this, the focus of education has to be not on the end goal of job-getting, but a middle ground. College should prepare you realistically to get a job while allowing you to learn about things you want to learn about. You should be able to major in Archaeology, but at the same time, to take classes in practical skills like data entry, grant writing, computer programming, graphic design. Education should be a two-pronged approach, but from a purely capitalistic approach, that isn't efficient, to expend time, money, and effort on something you won't use to make more money. And capitalism is all about efficiency. The inefficient course of action falls by the wayside. The thing is, though, you aren't just asking someone to give up lower earning potential when they choose Business over Art. You're asking them to give up on a dream. And if you don't give up on the dream, if you study what you want and you don't use it? Then the word people use to talk about your education is "waste." It doesn't matter if you have enriched your personal or spiritual understanding of the world. Those things are what captains of industry call "intangibles." They don't matter.

And I feel like this mindset has such negative implications about self-worth. It's like saying that you, you the person, don't matter as much as you the earner. You the employee. You're not what you know so much as what you MAKE. I hate that. I want to live in a world where learning is celebrated for its own sake, I guess, is what I'm saying. The Quakers have always been about this: women were educated in the 1600s, even though they would never have the ability to practice law or medicine or things like that. Education was its own end, not the means to an end. Is it a "waste" to educate women in Muslim countries that have Shariah law, because they will never be able to work outside the home? I don't think so. I really don't. "Knowledge is power"--that's a cliche, but I believe it. When you know about a thing, you have power over it. It can't hurt you anymore.

I want to live in a world where a desire to know about the law, and they way it's made, and the way it informs almost everything we do is enough of a validation to get a JD--even if you don't ever plan to make those laws, yourself. And I am "using" my law degree, dang it! I use it every single day. I use it when I send a contract to a client. I use it when I decide where to buy groceries, or gas. I use it when I wake up every morning. I use it every time I open my eyes.

"The problem with living in a capitalist system is that it becomes the driving force behind EVERYTHING, to the point where, if you step back and look around, actual happiness and enlightment have fallen by the wayside." [says my brilliant husband]

Is this true? And if so: is it fixable?