Desperate Helicopter Moms: An Open Letter
"My own outrage is driven primarily by something much more troubling on an individual level—the invalidation of my life."
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(Pictured above: Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman, who have been charged in the biggest college scandal in US history. Photo Via Vanity Fair)
by Rich Herschlag
I remember as if it was yesterday the afternoon in March 2011 when our older daughter opened the thin envelope from USC and read her rejection letter. She did it privately in her bedroom, but my wife and I could hear the envelope being slowly torn, the deafening silence, and finally a few tears flowing. She had excellent grades, great SAT scores, took a slew of AP courses, served as co-captain of the tennis team, produced amazing short feature films in her spare time and penned satirical essays for the school paper that made her dad proud.
When I had the chance to console her hours later I told her the college application process was a sick game conducted by a society of sadists descended from Romans who once sat in the Colosseum and shouted obscenities as slaves hacked each other to death. Nonetheless, I added, her day would come.
Your day, it seems, has finally come too, and it is not a good one. Your vapid sense of entitlement fueled by revenue from third-rate network dramas and inside traders masked as hedge funds has collided head-on with the same law enforcement wall that will undo the President any minute now. It’s not simply that your luck has run out. It’s that you never left anything up to luck, effort, faith, or anything at all that decent people have relied on historically.
I must give you grudging credit for both timing and thoroughness. Though unplanned, the timing of your bust comes at a moment building for many years when a vast majority of people living in the United States understand at a cellular level that almost every gate along the road of public life is controlled by a gatekeeper employed in turn by monied interests and corporate tyrants. Your participation in a pathetic conspiracy of collagen-shot privilege, moreover, represents a nexus of so many perversities in the remains of a once great civilization—voter suppression, dark money, Russian influence, “fake news,” the repeal of net neutrality, regressive taxation, discriminatory sentencing, legislation written by lobbyists to name just a few. You didn’t design the perfect symbolism any more than you orchestrated the timing, but nonetheless you are the new poster child for the swamp.
As such, you are loathed by so many for so many important reasons—your sheer arrogance, your outsized forced projection of physical beauty, your toxic effect on our collective sense of fairness—and even for less significant things you can’t squarely be blamed for, like the rejection of our kids by certain corrupt institutions. I, too, loathe you for all these reasons, but my own outrage is driven primarily by something much more troubling on an individual level—the invalidation of my life.
Princeton University in the early to mid-80s was a place that often pushed people to the edge of sanity. Generalizations and platitudes will get us nowhere. For me, it was all personal. I remember my friend Andy, whose pre-med course load and lab research schedule triggered his Crohn’s disease to the point where friends like me would deliver meals directly to his room in Dod Hall and try to get him to sit up straight. By graduation, the stress had taken such a toll on Andy’s digestive system he had to have a colectomy and wear a colostomy bag at 23.
I remember my roommate Dan, whose drinking problem combined with the stress of constant all-nighters had him stretched out on a campus lawn at the end of sophomore year screaming about the red team and the blue team and which one he thought the paramedics were on when they came to take him away. I remember my friend Scott, who feigned physical illness at the end of spring semester junior year to enter the infirmary and grab an extra day or two to study for the infamous organic chemistry final. When he found out he had overstayed his visit and would have to either take the course again the next semester or leave school altogether, Scott sprinted across campus in a panic wearing only his thin loose-fitting hospital gown.
I remember Dennis, also a high school classmate, whose Olympic swimming dreams went up in smoke after thousands of hours in the pool lead to debilitating surgery on his right shoulder. After that, his slave-driving father’s hopes dashed, Dennis descended into a realm of binge drinking and boastful womanizing that left him nearly friendless. I remember every few weeks learning of a friend or classmate who had decided to take a year off to recover from academic anxiety and “find” himself and wondering if they were ever coming back. About half the time they didn’t.
Most of all, I remember myself. I remember being overwhelmed for so long by a civil/structural engineering program that hit so hard and relentlessly that I would dream in equations and algorithms. I remember the trauma of going from top student to average and how the adjustment was internalized as self-loathing. I remember tuning out and turning off for about a year in the middle and tempting the dean to expel me as a kind of mercy killing. I remember working such long hours senior year my only reliable path to sleep involved melatonin, masturbation, half a Quaalude and a six-pack.
I remember during the final run to completing my senior thesis—a complex mathematical model of the synthetic covers of toxic waste landfills—seeing 17 consecutive sunrises from the window of the interactive computer graphics lab in the Engineering Quad. I remember final exams that semester living as an outpatient in the McCosh Health Center because I could only study in an infirmary bed.
These horrific memories are worth more to me than all the BOTOX and liposuction in the world. These four years were the closest I would ever come to being a marine. It’s not that I’m glad I was stripped down to nothing and had to rebuild my psyche from scratch. It’s that I cannot imagine who or what I would be today without it—both for better and for worse. Dorothy Parker once said about her vocation, “I hate writing, I love having written.” It’s much that way with me and my Ivy League fiasco of decades ago. It would have been better to validate myself through more graceful learning in a kinder, gentler setting. But how I actually validated myself—through survival under constant external and internal siege—is today my DNA.
And now you come along with your unearned, unredeemed millions pimping your hapless chameleon children to colleges sweating out their endowment quarterlies and US News & World Report rankings while worshipers are shot to death in New Zealand. For helping to make a mockery of what little is left of the American meritocracy, you are roundly despised by the downtrodden of this nation, who brainstorm nightly on what a suitable punishment might actually look like. Prison, massive fines, lawsuits, banishment from the entertainment industry, forced scholarship donations for the financially challenged, endless mockery on late night talk shows, even blood.
None of that will satisfy me. It’s not some sort of ill-defined petty vengeance I seek in return for invalidating my singular defining life experience. Rather, I want for you what you pretended to want for your children—an education. I want you to go from reading pilot scripts to reading Chomsky. I want you to go from using shopping apps to writing their code. I want you to go from checking your curves in the mirror to calculating the surface area of a double helix. And I want you to do it surrounded by hundreds of people much brighter than you and seemingly more capable and motivated. Then, and only then, will we be even.
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