Help student with huge debts

Letter of the day: do something about inequality of opportunity between generations of students

Opportunity inequality in education, everyone is talking about it. Yet the government has pursued policies that make inequality of opportunity a reality. After all, the current generation of students could only borrow for a study where previous and future students receive a basic grant. With towering debts as a result, if your parents are less fortunate.

Add to this the fact that these young people will soon have to pay for our pension reform and the costs of our environmental pollution. And also be able to borrow less for a house. My heart cries when I read: ‘Apparently the government thinks we are worth less than the previous generation.’ Sure, they aren’t worth less, but they don’t get the same opportunities as students before and after them. The government should take this into account.

Jose van der HoevenGouda

Refugees (1)

Dear Jan Rob Dijkstra, in your letter (Dear Editor, 26/3) you explain that you have not previously considered opening your house to Afghan and Syrian refugees because they leave their families in war zone, unlike Ukrainian men who stay to fight.

I would like to point out that these Afghan and Syrian men faced an incredibly difficult choice: either to take their family (wife and children I assume you mean) on a terrible and perilous journey in a small boat across the Mediterranean (thanks to the fortress Europe that we have created for refugees from these countries, Syrians and Afghans cannot travel to Europe so easily), or as a man just make this horror journey and hope you survive this.

And then receive asylum status in a European country so that your family can come legally and safely through family reunification. What would you do if you were in this situation? Judging from the safe armchair in a non-war zone is so easy.

Marina Meining, Nijmegen

Refugees (2)

For more than four weeks now, the Netherlands has been opening its borders wide to Ukrainians fleeing the war. Numerous private initiatives have been started, from hanging the Ukrainian flag, lacing bracelets in blue-yellow, driving to the Polish border to pick up people, a TV campaign for Giro 555 and much more.

All great, of course, but how distressing it is to see that refugees from Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan can hardly find a place in Ter Apel and have to sleep on chairs. This is also the fault of our government. Ukrainians are suddenly family, a mayor from the north of our country cannot sell it to his citizens that the shelters are also for others than Ukrainians. Let’s stop this and welcome all refugees with open arms.

Ilona DekkerNieuwegein

Refugees (3)

So nice to hear the same sound as you have in your mind. I’ve been hearing it a lot lately: ‘Why didn’t you do the same and feel the same with Syrian, Afghan or other non-Western refugees? I felt that I had to defend myself when I didn’t want to, because I now want to help these refugees.

Elma Drayer stated in her column what I also thought: if someone in my family gets cancer, I want to help right away, while I’m not going to help every cancer patient (although I wish I could). In the same way, I can now feel even more compassionate for the refugees from Ukraine, because a war that takes place in my backyard, so to speak, affects me a little more than one that takes place at a greater distance.

Alma StrongAmersfoort

Refugees (4)

As a post-war child I was able to enjoy the surplus emergency biscuits in case the bomb falls. For generations I have enjoyed the James Bond films and the countless John le Carré books where the Russians were the enemy. For seventy-five years we have been taught that the danger would come from the east. We have been able to experience the surprise of Hungary and Czechoslovakia by the Russians and the tense moments of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

That enemy now appears to actually do what we have been told against a people we are not far from. In addition, there is the real threat that the war will extend beyond Ukraine. Is it so strange that we receive and support precisely those victims with a lot of empathy? With more empathy than for equally large victims of a conflict in the Middle East incomprehensible to us?

The fact that this altruism is characterized by some as discriminatory is an example of appropriating someone else’s victimization. Can it be better? Surely you can: improve the world and start with yourself.

Julius van DamZwolle