One of the reasons I liked having Chubs around and I'm glad he is back is because of his love of discussing things with me. I picked him up after school and we ran a couple of errands, first to get pan dulce, then to Home Depot to replace the air filters for the house A/C and finally to eat at Bill Miller.
At Bill Miller while we were eating, he asked would I still be able to eat an animal if we could talk in the same language? I said wow, that would suck, the cow pleading "don't kill me, I thought we were friends. I guess that would be a good way to make everyone a vegan. I don't think I have a problem eating anything, but I would rather not hear it talking to me. He then added "what if you were locked in the house, and you couldn't escape and all you had with you was grandma's Winnie dog (since we don't have a dog of our own). Would you eat it? I said probably, that is why we say life is a "dog eat dog world to be corny.
Anytime I think of eating extremes, I remember about the team of rugby players who crashed in the Andes mountains and ended up doing a little cannibalism. I told him if we ended up crashing and he didn't survive, and we had no choice, we might eat him. He agreed that that would be the smart thing to do. It would be stupid to bury the dead if there was no meat and the dead were being buried when they could be used for sustenance.
While walking through Home Depot, we were also having the discussion about being smart and learning. He was complaining about a handful of kids who don't seem interested in learning at school. I told him, learning is not for everyone. I told him probably 20% of the people he knows will end up getting a degree from a college, then I thought that sounded low and said maybe 30%. I was looking it up a while ago and it turns out that according to a study done by Harvard, only 6.7% of the world has a college degree, in the US population the percentage increases closer to 30%.
In my quest to be right though, since we are Hispanic, if I look at the data, as of 2015, a Pew Research study says only 15% of Hispanics have a college degree, so since I live in a brown world, I am close to being right when I tell Chubs, given most of his friends are Hispanic, expect only about 20% of your friends to get degrees by the time you grow up. Those numbers are improving yearly and at this point, Hispanics have the highest enrollment in college, surpassing the white population in 2013. This is a good sign as we are finally understanding that the only way to move it on up is to get more schooling than the next person.
I am doing all I can, I am a big believer in college and expanding your knowledge base. Anybody who I notice with an interest, I will push them to get some college. Just last week, at Whataburger, our receptionist, a black husky kid was showing a lot of interest in the homework that Chubs was doing. He mentioned how he had graduated high school out in Oklahoma and he was missing school, he couldn't wait for it to end, but now finds life a little less than exciting. I told him it sounded like he needed to get back to school, to look into it at ACC. He seemed genuinely interested and said he was already thinking about it. I told him the best way to attend is to go to one of the campuses and talk to an advisor, he said he wasn't familiar with Austin yet, he had just moved here, I then told him to look it up online, they do have a decent website. He said he would, guess we'll see.
No comments:
Post a Comment