Defaulting on our personal responsibility

Boy, was I dumb to pay back my college loans.

That is the conclusion of writer Lee Siegel, who explained in a New York Times op-ed why he never paid back his.

Siegel’s parents had limited means, so, at 17, he borrowed to go to a pricey private school for two years. When his parents divorced and his father went bankrupt, he transferred, the poor suffering lad, to a lower-cost state college.

“Years later, I found myself confronted with a choice that too many people have had to and will have to face,” he writes. “I could give up what had become my vocation (in my case, being a writer) and take a job that I didn’t want in order to repay the huge debt I had accumulated in college and graduate school. Or I could take what I had been led to believe was both the morally and legally reprehensible step of defaulting on my student loans, which was the only way I could survive without wasting my life in a job that had nothing to do with my particular usefulness to society.”

First off, your premise is dead wrong. Great writers have almost always worked jobs they didn’t want, to pay the bills.

William Faulkner worked for the post office. Kurt Vonnegut managed a car dealership. Stephen King worked as a janitor and dry cleaner. Harper Lee took reservations for an airline. John Steinbeck was a painter and handyman.

One of my favorite authors, O. Henry (William Sydney Porter), was a ranch hand, pharmacist, draftsman and bank clerk — he met many colorful characters in these various jobs, who influenced some of his greatest stories.

I am a professional writer, too, and my parents didn’t have enough money to cover my college bills, either.

To come up with my Penn State tuition, my father worked overtime while I labored as a stonemason every summer.

During the school year, I worked as a dishwasher, janitor, handyman, grass cutter and rooming-house manager. I worked as a bouncer, too, which involved kicking drunk people out of bars and mopping up that which some patrons couldn’t keep down.

I sold my plasma for 10 bucks a pop twice a week — though it nearly killed me (when my mother found out, she nearly strangled me).