It’s one thing to nonchalantly pay your 3.85% mortgage on something that you live in, a comfortable home that appreciates in value, is an asset you can eventually sell to recoup your investment, if not also a profit.

It’s another thing entirely to pay mortgage interest four times what the banks are paying, on a house you will never live in, a house full of vermin and every kind of expensive vexation, a house of plague you avoid.  And the repayment amount exceeds your combined income for a decade.

But I’m not here to whine about interest rates on unwisely taken student loans.  There is more important business, like getting you to reading this again, with focus and attention.  To imbibe its truth, and to taste the truth of it, and to think on it a moment.

WENDELL BERRY:  But that’s the problem we’re in to start with, we’ve tried to impose the answers.

The answers will come not from walking up to your farm and saying this is what I want and this is what I expect from you.

You walk up and you say what do you need. And you commit yourself to say all right, I’m not going to do any extensive damage here until I know what it is that you are asking of me.

And this can’t be hurried.  This is the dreadful situation that young people are in.

I think of them and I say well, the situation you’re in now is a situation that’s going to call for a lot of patience.

And to be patient in an emergency is a terrible trial.

source: http://billmoyers.com/episode/full-show-wendell-berry-poet-prophet/