College loan debt collectors.

Months ago I feared these wake-up calls. Would these faceless people somehow extract my bank information from me and tap into my savings, even though I wasn’t ready to pay up? Would I grow as pathetic as the freecreditreport.com kid, strumming a guitar for tourists decked in Jimmy Buffet T-shirts? Would I never escape the embarrassment of being a 23-year-old with a bachelor’s degree in English hanging on the wall of my childhood bedroom?

After a dozen or so of these calls, however, I learned the debt collectors were as savvy at keeping me on the phone as John McCain was at writing an e-mail.

As for the bank that put me through college, it will not be receiving anything from me anytime soon.

Sure, I took the money and earned a bachelor’s degree, learning the skills I’d need to become a productive member of society who paid his past dues of membership in the American Dream.

But the work I need to pay back those dues isn’t there. Even my failsafe plan of seeking employment in the education sector evaporated along with my rainy-day funds when layoffs and hiring freezes rocked my home state of Florida.

And my debt keeps collecting interest.

As a young voter trying to enter the workforce I now compete with older generations now unemployed or seeking second jobs. They are people who have amassed lengthy resumes and find themselves like sharks searching for chummed waters of opportunity in any sort of entry-level job they can sink their jaws into.

The junior copywriter position at the marketing agency now demands six years of experience because only the most talented ad writers can stoke this economy. The manager at the retail store now wants to hire the mother of two as a sales associate because she will put in the extra hours without any questions asked and truly needs the job more than I do. The people who are lucky enough to have jobs look over their backs for their boss’s eye, knowing any slight misstep could cost them their jobs because so many people are willing to fill their void, even if it means working for less.

And while U.S. citizens of all ages fight each other for work, Wall Street is set to receive a raise of $700 billion from taxpayers like me, struggling through high gas prices, unemployment and job insecurity.

How did Americans find themselves waking up groggy in debt and fearing the future of their professional lives?

Deregulation. Plain and simple.

On both sides of the aisle, government officials sought to put as many people in the homeownership category as possible. Possibly good intentioned.

But when the home-mortgage sector was deregulated to the extent that lenders could get away with not asking for credit and income checks so as to increase demand for homeownership (home prices surged as it was sexy to invest in this sector), how did they not expect people to default on loans that they thought they were capable of paying? People used to trust banks to keep them from entering into loans they could not afford; after all, no bank wants to run out of money to loan.

The ramifications of loan payments not reaching the banks spread throughout our economic infrastructure, resulting in inflation, difficulty in receiving loans for investment, unemployment and job insecurity.

And now, like a significant other who has cheated us before -- first after Sept. 11, 2001, by exploiting our fears and shredding the Constitution with the PATRIOT Act, second with the lead-up to the Iraq war with weapons of mass destruction -- the government expects us to trust it a third time with the $700 billion bailout by offering a rush for approval without a substantive policy debate.

The current manifestation of the bailout benefits an industry that deceived people into bad loans and will now use our tax money to write loans that will collect interest: double taxation, essentially.

I think of the phrase “taxation without representation” and wonder, with our tax dollars on the brink of being stolen from us, when will we see our generation’s Boston Tea Party?

The American people are not stupid and seem to be waking up from the slumber of the past eight years. Thousands of people took to the streets Thursday in New York, Washington, Detroit and other cities across the nation and said, “Enough!”

It takes only a spark to create a prairie fire. The government should think again about burning Americans a third time, because there’s enough dry weeds around the un-mowed lawns of foreclosed homes to set the entire country ablaze.

What we need now is a substantive policy debate to ensure we line the pockets of those victimized by deregulation, not those who left us in the unemployment line and under the bridge. I’m tired of fighting my elders for jobs. I’d like my chance at the American Dream, to sleep in and keep the debt collectors at bay.