Last week American Student Assistance released an 8-minute movie horror movie called THE RED. It’s about debt, and after the film ends, there’s a call to action to face your own debt (“you can’t outrun it, all you can do is face it and fight it”). I spoke with ASA managing director Sue Burton about her organization and what they’re doing to help people confront their student loans.

LS: Tell me about your organization, Sue Burton.

SB: American Student Assistance has been around for 57 years helping borrowers navigate repaying loans. SALT is our program to help students get ahead of their loans. We’ve found the best way to help students manage their loans is to help them when they’re make borrowing decisions, to get them informed and engaged for when they ultimately leave school.

LS: Your movie gave me a knot in my stomach.

SB: The goal is to drive awareness of the power of solutions. So much is written about the problem of student loan debt—but we want students to feel empowered to take action, to look at solutions, to get themselves informed about their options. You can ask people if they have student loans and they’ll say, oh yeah, but you ask much, they have no idea.

Students are disengaged from the details of their loans and how to manage those loans—they’re paralyzed.

Taylor was obsessed with paying off her student loans—and then decided the obsession wasn't a good thing.

But there has been some criticism as well, or at least, some questions about what the Rolling Jubilee will actually be able to accomplish in the grand scheme of things (it won't for example, actually get the banks to change any of their unfair lending practices).

I was drowning in debt. So I went to Kosovo.

Single Mom: I'm 42 years old, divorced, and a single mom of three elementary school-age kids. I work in the administration of a nonprofit. I live in a Maryland suburb of D.C.

Thanks to my grandparents, I finished undergrad with zero debt. But then I went to grad school and got two degrees. One is a law degree (quite useful), the other is basically a conversation piece. (My boss: “Did you actually earn that degree, or did you buy the diploma on eBay?”) For these, I have just over $239,000 in student loan debt, down from the approximately $253,000 I started with.

I have a lot of feelings about my debt. Mostly I am ashamed that I complain about it. Because as huge as it is, my personal privilege is correspondingly huge. I didn’t waste my money. I bought myself a present and now I am paying for it by leveraging the present—I have a job! And my job is REALLY GOOD. My job makes even my ludicrous debt totally manageable with money to spare to live comfortably. So I am ashamed that I feel the burden at all when compared to what so most people face, I live in the penthouse at Number One Easy Street. And yet I still bitch and moan.

Has a month gone by already? It's time to check in with our debt payments.

Does anyone have a good "I tried to get out of debt but it was hard and took me a long time" story?

Mike: One of the things we examined this week was what debt means to us as individuals. What should we think about when paying it off? There is no one right answer, of course, because debt means something different to each of us. So let's talk about this. Logan, your debt is all consumer, right? You don't have any student loans.

OWS phase two.