The Deletion of a Child's Future; The Return of Save Dave

My mother (link to highly depictive video sent upon email request) has officially released parental plans for my now 16-year-old brother. It seems that after the first two sons used parental money to basically put themselves through Tufts and the University of Virginia, young David will not be encouraged to follow in their footsteps. Despite his utterly sick 99% average in the honors program at a Queens private school, the parents are "gonna tell him to take the civil service test so he can work for the sanitation for twenny yeas and then retiya."

The plan also includes complicated subliminal messaging: telling siblings and possibly Dave himself that Dave "won't get into a good college," not encouraging Dave to participate in any extracurricular activities that might increase the likelihood of his acceptance into a better school, and most recently, preventing him from taking an SAT-II exam because he was sick (whether he was actually sick is debatable--Dave had recently broken his nose, but I don't know how bad conditions were).

Apparently city retirement benefits are so stellar--just ask my dad, a transit worker--that they outweigh the literal cost of higher education. Sadly this is no surprise, as it is news from people who have demonstrated an inexplicable ability to learn absolutely nothing during a combined 7 years of college parenting.

My thoughts are with Dave as he begins to navigate his last two years of high school with the typically Bellingerian, total lack of intellectual support. There is no way that college is not for him. Given his intellectual abilities and the way society works, I don't think he has a choice: he has to continue his education, and at a damn good school. He deserves better than a garbageman's life, but for now it doesn't look like he's going to get any nudges in the right direction from the people closest --at least, physically--to him.