National parents admissions bribery scandal is shameful

Elijah O’Bryant, Writer

In the recent cycle of national news, you might have heard about this recent college admission scandal. You may know by now that about 50 or so affluent parents, coaches and “businessmen” were arrested earlier this week for various forms of fraud. At the center of this whole mess was Rick Singer, a life coach based in Southern California, who ran the non-profit organization Key Worldwide, which aimed to help students who are disadvantaged and to help young people escape troubled lives and gang violence.

It worked rather beautifully too. The slush fund would operate through large private donations, in which Singer would pocket some cash paid to him and use what was left over to bribe whomever he needed to get the results his clients would pay for. Among these bribes would be finding people to take the tests for the children of these wealthy clients, helping them cheat during their SAT’s, and poorly Photoshopping their heads onto more athletic bodies to get special athletic admissions. They were especially foolish in some of these, like claiming that one kid was 6’1 instead of his actual 5’5 to make him more appealing to the basketball team, as if none of the coaches would ever see that the poor kid was 8 inches shorter than what his file said.

Look, I can go on and on about the technical details of all this, but you know what? I want to take time to address the people involved with this scandal. I have never been more unfortunate to be alive today than to see what wrongs these people have committed. These people have taken me to a level of hell in which I can say that Mr. Charles Kushner has moral superiority.

I am well aware that he participated in the Ivy League’s favoritism and supported white, rich families’ methods of getting admissions. I know he shamelessly wasted money that could have fed the poor to buy his pathetically unimpressive waste of 18 years into college through obscene donations. I am especially aware of how these schools are bone-grindingly shameless in spewing their hypocrisy of meritocracy. But at least Jared Kushner did not rely on his parents to cheat on his test scores to get into college. At least he took the test, settled for mediocrity, and let his father buy his way into college, which only reinforced the maw of lies meritocracy wants us to believe in.

The 50 parties involved with this fresh scandal make me weep for the very prospect of human decency. These people knew there were means far less pathetic than what they tried to attempt, and yet they do something like this. This was an embarrassingly profane act of stupidity that makes me infuriated to the point where I cannot become any angrier.

I do want to see them apologize for what they did. I really do. I will know I can rest easier once I see these people shed rivers of crocodile tears as they lie to the entire world that they feel remorse and wish that we as a species can forgive them. I think it would be well worth it. I would be watching the moment in which they could think that the world could forgive them. I would then watch that hope die in the faces of idiots whose divorce from reality can rival that of our president’s.