Sigh.
The vaccination thing I've gone on about before, and no need to recycle that again, except to point out I've got gently aggressive about it. "Godzilla was vaccinated yesterday and slept through the night without a peep!" and "we've been following the government vaccination schedual for Godzilla and he's double his enormous birthweight at four months and smarter than your two year old", etc. Well, implicitly. I'm not into insulting other people's kids, especially when those same kids are busy fighting off the tail end of whooping cough. But I suspect I'm gently spoiling for a fight.
Some of the lifetstyle aspects of our friends here annoy me a lot. I don't have a problem with privilege, as should be obvious considering what a privileged lifestyle my family can and does enjoy on my inflated pay and the fact that 90% of my close friends have two degrees and the time to read books. Or not much of a problem. Nothing that can't be sorted out with the help of a pscyhotherapeutic professional, anyways. But I do have a problem with the abuse of privilege, which is what I consider the middle-class-anti-vaccination movement.
Oh, so you don't want to line Big Pharma's pockets with a taxpayer-subsidized vaccination programme? Great, let's all pay great stonking wads of cash out of pocket to a bunch of fucking homeo-and-naturopaths when our kids come down with whooping cough, assuming they're old enough to not get hospitalized/brain damage. I guess the poor people will find a way to manage. That's a much fairer idea. Much more fucking equitable and transparent. Fight the man, assholes, you are fucking radical, you fucking Che Guevara of the Australian yuppie movement. Fuck.
Sorry, I guess I did just recycle that there.
Anyways, the other thing that annoys me but is a little more complicated, I understand, is how all our friends here are all over private school enrollment for their kids, which frankly makes me feel icky. It's something you just don't do in Canada unless you're buying something really awesome, in the sense of a super-equipped school with awesome facilities and jet packs and shit. It is far, far less what it is here, which is the difference between a four star and a five star hotel - pricing out the riff-raff. Which, I appreciate more and more, is at least partly code for not sending your kids to school with aboriginal people.
I detest private school on that pricing-out level. But at the same time I have to ask myself, and answer if I look into my heart "maybe yes", whether or not I would send Godzilla to private school if we stayed here. The two tiers are established now; teachers compete to get into the private schools, where troublemakers can just be kicked out and life is, understandably, much easier for them, and resources are better, and all the rest of it. I'm glad we're leaving for a country without that sort of two-tier system before I'm thrust up against that moral contradiction.
My tax burden tripling seems like a small price to pay. Example: I've got Godzilla onto a waiting list for a Waldorf kindergarten in NRW. It costs 100 euros a month, which is mostly for the food. The local Steiner school costs almost exactly 25 times that. Well tee fucking hee . . . them tax eurodollars do go somewhere.
The vaccination thing I've gone on about before, and no need to recycle that again, except to point out I've got gently aggressive about it. "Godzilla was vaccinated yesterday and slept through the night without a peep!" and "we've been following the government vaccination schedual for Godzilla and he's double his enormous birthweight at four months and smarter than your two year old", etc. Well, implicitly. I'm not into insulting other people's kids, especially when those same kids are busy fighting off the tail end of whooping cough. But I suspect I'm gently spoiling for a fight.
Some of the lifetstyle aspects of our friends here annoy me a lot. I don't have a problem with privilege, as should be obvious considering what a privileged lifestyle my family can and does enjoy on my inflated pay and the fact that 90% of my close friends have two degrees and the time to read books. Or not much of a problem. Nothing that can't be sorted out with the help of a pscyhotherapeutic professional, anyways. But I do have a problem with the abuse of privilege, which is what I consider the middle-class-anti-vaccination movement.
Oh, so you don't want to line Big Pharma's pockets with a taxpayer-subsidized vaccination programme? Great, let's all pay great stonking wads of cash out of pocket to a bunch of fucking homeo-and-naturopaths when our kids come down with whooping cough, assuming they're old enough to not get hospitalized/brain damage. I guess the poor people will find a way to manage. That's a much fairer idea. Much more fucking equitable and transparent. Fight the man, assholes, you are fucking radical, you fucking Che Guevara of the Australian yuppie movement. Fuck.
Sorry, I guess I did just recycle that there.
Anyways, the other thing that annoys me but is a little more complicated, I understand, is how all our friends here are all over private school enrollment for their kids, which frankly makes me feel icky. It's something you just don't do in Canada unless you're buying something really awesome, in the sense of a super-equipped school with awesome facilities and jet packs and shit. It is far, far less what it is here, which is the difference between a four star and a five star hotel - pricing out the riff-raff. Which, I appreciate more and more, is at least partly code for not sending your kids to school with aboriginal people.
I detest private school on that pricing-out level. But at the same time I have to ask myself, and answer if I look into my heart "maybe yes", whether or not I would send Godzilla to private school if we stayed here. The two tiers are established now; teachers compete to get into the private schools, where troublemakers can just be kicked out and life is, understandably, much easier for them, and resources are better, and all the rest of it. I'm glad we're leaving for a country without that sort of two-tier system before I'm thrust up against that moral contradiction.
My tax burden tripling seems like a small price to pay. Example: I've got Godzilla onto a waiting list for a Waldorf kindergarten in NRW. It costs 100 euros a month, which is mostly for the food. The local Steiner school costs almost exactly 25 times that. Well tee fucking hee . . . them tax eurodollars do go somewhere.
4 commenti:
There's plenty of two-tier in Germany. Though subsidies are fantastic. That said - your deal is a good one and much much better than any UK one.
I despise the Private schools thing. I've been in and out of enough of them recently to have the (very strong) evidence to back my previous prejudices.
The reckless fucking luvvy thing that the middle-class do re vaccination? Does my nut in. My 5 were all 'done'. And for the first two the timing couldn't have been worse for an anxious parent - it was at the height of the whooping cough vaccination/ autism link thing...
Like Godzilla my 5 were all fed by me (for a silly lazy amount of time) and were all fat bastards with huge fat IQs.
I've had a few fights with the anti-vacc brigade. They achieved nothing. Just underlined how much I despised them.
It looks like a tonne of tiers in Germany, at least at the kita level in NRW - just with money not being that siginificant a barrier to entry. A certail irony comes in the fact I might have to pay for private care anyways if the other barriers are big enough.
Yes, the fights would get me nowhere. Except expressed, much good would it do me. There was a whooping cough autism thing as well as an MMR autism thing? Gosh.
It was MMR. I'm demented. Too old to remember anything bar the anger. Doh. The whooping cough and Hib scares were about brain damage and epilepsy. I think. It was all meant to be scary. I just shut my eyes and got on with it - I was bored/too intellectually lazy to think too deeply about it all. Then I came over all macho and working class and mocked the yummy mummy middle class West End types with their flash fucking cards and their endless baby stimulation classes. It was (maybe is) always a class issue for me...
Being middle class (which I am in the cultural-capital-good-income sense and not in the frankly fucking bizarre British sense) and also underemployed, I did a lot of investigation before the jabs and was almost completely confident getting them stuck in the boy.
Baby stimulation classes, though, now there's a fucking vicious scam. Babies are stimulated by being loved and cuddled and talked to and played with. The assholes who monetize that are either freaks or bastards, most likely a cocktail of both.
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