Detroit. It was, for many years, the strongest city in America. Home to General Motors, Ford, Packard, Chrysler and many other of America's biggest automakers for years, Detroit was an economic powerhouse in the world. In World War 2, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt himself would refer to Detroit as the "arsenal of democracy" in one of his regular fireside chats over the radio. For much of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, almost anyone in Michigan could expect, at a minimum, to get a job either in Detroit or anywhere else in the state within the automotive industry right after graduating from high school. The wages were high, and the work itself was a guaranteed 40 hour a week job. The workers with Ford and General Motors in particular stood out. Flush with cash from one of the best jobs someone could have in the country, Detroit would see an explosion in it's population. It would be seen, for a time, as the gem of America. A beautiful city with a happy, industrious and hard working population.
While I only lived within Detroit's actual city boundaries for a brief time in my life, one couldn't go anywhere in Michigan without feeling it's influence, or at least seeing the influence it had over much of the state for countless decades. In the Upper Peninsula, you would find in the western portions plenty of iron mines, which provided the backbone for many of the plants constructed to serve the automotive industry in Detroit. In the thumb region, untold amounts of automotive suppliers would be open all day and all night, producing center console pieces for Ford and General Motors along with a host of other products that went into building some of the most legendary vehicles ever made by both companies. In towns like Lansing, Grand Rapids, Romeo, Flint, Dearborn, Wayne and Livonia, one could not go more than a few blocks without seeing a Ford, GM or Chrysler plant on every other block in the industrial areas of town. If it wasn't one of the Big Three's plants, then it was another company that helped to forge the components of cars and trucks the Big Three pumped out without ceasing.
With all of the money being produced in Michigan because of the Big Three's influence in and around Detroit, incredible monuments and structures would be built all over Michigan. In Dearborn, it was the Henry Ford Village and Museum. Just up the road from Dearborn, it was the River Rouge plant, a structure easily seen on clear days for miles around. On Woodrow Avenue running through Highland Park, the mighty building responsible for the very first Model T cars was built by Henry Ford himself. Throughout downtown Detroit itself, dozens of art sculptures can be found that honor the mighty industrial center that was Detroit. In the northern suburbs of Detroit, one of the world's finest medical institutions exists in the form of the Henry Ford Hospital, a world renowned hospital which has existed for nearly a century to help treat society's most ill patients, and coupled with an expansive medical research center. In Wayne County alone, Henry Ford Community College exists, along with the Henry Ford Library. In Pontiac, there existed the once mighty Silverdome, which sadly is to be torn down within a matter of time. Michigan truly was an economic powerhouse because of the automotive industry, and it's natural beauty outside of the industrial centers within the state are still a wonder to behold in my eyes. But, along the way, something happened.
I don't know where to pinpoint it. I don't know if Detroit began it's downward fall with the closing of the Packard Automotive plant in the 1950s. I don't know if it began with the administration of Coleman A. Young, a divisive political figure who heavily factored into Detroit politics for the better part of two decades. But either way, something happened. For those of you old enough to remember, we had something happen in the 1970s: a gas crisis of unbelievable proportions. I remember hearing the stories from the old timers in my fair share of small towns over the years throughout Michigan: endless lines of consumers lined up at gas stations throughout the country, struggling to get just a little bit of fuel for an extremely high price as OPEC held the United States at bay, the end result of a disastrous Middle Eastern policy that had involved Israel, a state which has earned the virtual enmity of the entire Middle Eastern world for nearly 70 years. President Jimmy Carter, as I was told, ended up paying dearly for events beyond his control. He paid for events that took root during Gerald R. Ford's presidency, and in the aftermath we would see the elevation of a B rate movie actor to the role of President. In the aftermath of this mess, Detroit would begin to suffer as consumers nationwide began to see American automobiles as unreliable and gas guzzlers, a side effect of the dramatic spike in oil prices throughout the 1970s.
Japenese automakers such as Toyota and Honda would first begin to see a true spike in popularity with consumers in the early 1980s. American cars were seen at the time as antiquated and behind the times. For that, Michigan, and Detroit in particular, would pay dearly. Coupled with this was the beginning of a long, uninterrupted war against the very unions that had worked hard for years to ensure American factory workers got a fair wage, fair working hours, fair benefits and safe working conditions. This I suppose could be blamed on the blowback from a new generation of CEOs who began to see the hoarding of money as their ultimate goal in life. They almost seemed to take offense to the idea of having to pay more money they wanted to keep out to American workers. And of all the cities to first feel the pain was Flint.
Flint was the city that gave us Michael Moore, a filmmaker who even now is a divisive figure within the political world. As GM's financial problems began to manifest in the early 1980s, one of the first major plants that would close up shop and relocate to another country was a General Motors plant in Flint. It began in 1985 with the announcement that all of the employees in this particular plant would be let go, with their jobs in turn being sent off to Mexico along with all of the plant's operations. Flint never recovered from the blow - GM was the single largest employer in the area, and soon to follow GM's exit was Ford and several other secondary auto suppliers in the area. Even today, the city is dotted with the rotting remains of formerly active automotive plants. The residents there have suffered greatly as well, as whatever is left of the area's economy is now heavily based on the notoriously low wage service industry - fast food, hotels and retail. The crime rate in Flint also skyrocketed during this period, and for a time Flint was the second most violent city in America. But that's not what this is about, although it does play into a small part of the story of Ford, General Motors and Chrysler, and how they pertain to Detroit as a city.
At the same time Flint was beginning to recede into the throes of chaos, Detroit too would see similar events unfold. The story was the same no matter where you went throughout the city. Initially, the Big Three automakers, along with dozens of automotive suppliers, relocated most of their jobs to the suburbs of Detroit. This did not sit well with the residents of Detroit, many of whom had seen their wages declining throughout the 1980s. Coleman Young and the Detroit City Council, for their part, elected to almost ignore the alarming increases in poverty and in crime within the city of Detroit, focusing instead on crooked deals with city contractors, lavish bonuses for themselves, and a pension plan for legions of city workers that was never adjusted to keep on pace with the slowing decline in Detroit's population. On Detroit's south side, the once might Chrysler plant would be closed down before the end of the 1980s, only to end up with one section a deteriorating hulk (which currently is owned by the Moroun family), and the other ending up as a shipping container storage yard. In other parts of the city, several smaller Ford and GM plants would close up as well, only to open back up in Mexico. Those who could afford to do so fled the city, leaving their homes and businesses to stand vacant throughout the city. Those who were left behind were left with a nightmare no one had ever imagined would hit the city.
Having lost much of it's manufacturing base, the people living within Detroit took up other means of survival. Many were lost to a crack epidemic which would rage throughout Detroit until the mid-1990s. Others would turn to criminal activity as a means of survival - robbery rapidly became the new norm of Detroit, as did gang violence throughout much of the city. The police department, despite some truly valiant efforts, could not put a stop to the epidemic of violence and drug use that infested Detroit after the abrupt departure of so many thousands of manufacturing jobs throughout the city. Looking back through newspaper articles and television news reports at the time, it is easy to see why Detroit ended up the way it did - when people have nothing to lose, they will do anything to get by, even if it means harming one another in the process.
By the late 1990s, Detroit was known nationwide as a dark and violent city. Dennis Archer had taken over as mayor earlier in the decade, and had attempted to make reforms to the city. Many of the holdovers from Coleman A. Young's administration proved to be obstinate, however. Bribery and racketeering was almost a fact of life in City Hall, and beyond it's borders lay a city struggling to survive. Few jobs could be found throughout Detroit, and as a result of NAFTA's passage at the federal level, the rest of Michigan began to feel the economic pain of the Big Three's uprooting of untold amounts of manufacturing jobs. The same would happen with the hundreds of automotive suppliers dotting the state, with one especially egregious case unfolding in nearby Port Huron by 2007, as Collins & Aikman, one of the strongest automotive supply companies within the state, abruptly folded operations and ceased to exist after years of what some have described as a great depression repeatedly swept across the entire state. In Detroit, few automotive companies remained. Ford, GM and Chrysler still had plants in the suburbs: Ford in Sterling Heights, Romeo, Wayne, Dearborn and Livonia, while GM had small plants in Port Huron, Westland and a few other smaller communities. Chrysler, for it's part, still retained plants up near Port Huron and out in the western suburbs of Detroit, but as a whole, the disastrous effects of NAFTA had left a wake of destruction throughout Detroit and Michigan. It even spread to other states in the region: Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and even Minnesota. Everyone in the region felt the pain as the Big Three continued to struggle to compete with Toyota, Kia, Hyundai and Honda.
By 2001, Detroit was the archetype of what many perceived to be a failed city. Untold thousands of abandoned buildings took up large plots of land throughout the city. The violent crime rate was still the highest in the entire nation. Everywhere you went in and around Detroit, you could find direct evidence of the decline of the manufacturing sector. Inkster, a city once known for a relatively vibrant culture in the 1960s, and even more known worldwide as being the birthplace of the genre of music that later came to be known as Motown, was one of the top ten most violent communities in Michigan, with epic amounts of corruption and accusations of endless incidents of abuses thrown towards the police department. Westland had suffered a similar fate: entire neighborhoods that at one point were the most beautiful in western Wayne County had became a haven for drug activity, with scores upon scores of streets lined with run down homes. Wayne was no better, and Livonia, Romulus, Southgate and Troy all were in no better condition. No matter where you went, violent crime and drugs were rampant everywhere, and the lack of a stable job environment was all too evident from the numerous numbers of boarded up buildings: schools closed because of budgetary constraints (made possible by out-of-work citizens with little money to their names), entire hospitals closed down due to a lack of money, numerous homes and housing projects boarded up - the latter of which was once considered to be the hallmark of a society that took care of it's poorest citizens in the 1960s, numerous small businesses that had failed from the inability of local auto workers being unable to patronize these establishments...it was one of the most heartbreaking sights I can ever recall seeing. In downtown Detroit, numerous abandoned skyscrapers were seemingly everywhere you went. And then, something close to what everyone thought was a change happened.
At the federal level in 2001, there was much anguish over the election of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, and even more anguish over the mass election of a Republican dominated Congress. In Michigan, John Engler remained as the governor. Much criticism had been directed towards him, as he and several of his predecessors ignored the plight of Detroit and many of the outlying communities that had relied so much upon the automotive industry for work. Trade agreement after trade agreement was passed in the state legislature. With each new agreement came the loss of even more manufacturing jobs to nations such as the Philippines, Mexico, China, Vietnam, India, South Korea, Taiwan and dozens of third world countries, where local laws allowed for wages to be paid in mere pennies per day. The state, thus, held it's collective breath as the race for mayor in Detroit raged on. The two primary candidates were Kwame Kilpatrick, considered at the time to be a rising star in the Democratic Party from his service in the House of Representatives for Michigan, and Gil Hill, the President of City Council at the time. Kilpatrick came out on top, and many in the state celebrated his victory, bolstered by his promises to restore a city that many still thought of as Michigan's crown jewel. Those hopes would be dashed within a matter of years.
One of Kilpatrick's first actions was to close down the Belle Isle Zoo and Aquarium, a once fine institution that had been left to rot since the early 1970s. Luckily, in that instance, City Council came to it's senses and overrode his veto to deny all funding to Belle Isle and budgeted around $700,000 for it to remain open. It would also become public knowledge late in his first term that Kilpatrick had used $210,000 from a city-owned credit card on lavish dinners, spas and fine wines. Kilpatrick in the end only paid $9,000 back towards that debt, and he would also draw fire for using city funds to lease a personal vehicle for his family. Rumors would begin to circulate during his campaign for a second term as mayor that a party at Manoogian Mansion, the traditional home of almost all of Detroit's mayors for several decades, had involved the cover-up of the death of an exotic dancer. Despite those matters coming to light, Kilpatrick still managed to win a second term to office.
In 2008, all of the allegations towards Kilpatrick would come full circle, as investigators determined that the death of this exotic dancer, Tamara Greene, was likely the result of a hit carried out by unidentified members of the Detroit Police Department. Piling onto this were dozens of other crimes of which Kilpatrick would ultimately be found guilty of: pension funds influence peddling, 10 counts of mail fraud, three counts of wire fraud, five counts of filing a false tax return, one count of tax evasion and bribery - all stemming from redirecting city contracts to favor companies ran by family and friends. He additionally would get charged with perjury, misconduct in office and obstruction of justice as a result of an extramarital affair carried out with an aide of his - an extramarital affair where city resources were used to propagate this affair. Throughout his entire time in office, Kilpatrick would also earn enemies in the form of the Detroit Fire Department, who for years had been stuck using outdated and unsafe equipment and additionally were stuck in buildings not even safe for habitation. After repeated requests for more funding, Kilpatrick finally blew them off, stating at an event these words: "Let them eat steak."
Detroit would go through several temporary mayors in the aftermath of Kilpatrick's subsequent indictment for all of the above listed charges. Kenneth Cockrel, Jr., a long serving member of City Council and President at the time of Kilpatrick's indictment and ultimate resignation, would take the reigns of power until the fall of 2008, ultimately losing the next election to Dave Bing, who in turn would be delegated to the sidelines as the governor intervened: Detroit was billions of dollars in debt, and was placed under the auspices of an emergency finance manager. Under that finance manager, Kevyn Orr, Detroit would file for bankruptcy, officially becoming the largest city in the country to do such an act. In the end, the total amount that Detroit was behind on? $18.5 billion in debt. Succeeding Dave Bing was Mike Duggan, the first white mayor since Roman Gibbs in the early 1970s. Throughout the past several years, several other individuals were also convicted of bribery, with one of the most prominent of them being Monica Conyers. She served over 3 years in prison for conspiring to commit bribery as part of Kwame Kilpatrick's corrupt dealings, and even today is still being investigated by federal officials for her exact role in the political corruption that had seeped into Detroit and eventually turned into a cancer of sorts...a cancer that plagued the city during the downfall of the manufacturing industry in Detroit. A cancer that, by every definition, helped push it's very vulnerable population to the brink of destruction through sheer neglect and defunding of valuable city services such as police, fire, transportation, education, healthcare, water, sewage and trash disposal.
Today, Detroit stands as one of the most epic stories in modern American history. It is a proud city, despite all of the past pains it has endured. A program, begun under Dave Bing, is still underway. That program's overall goal? To get rid of as many decrepit and abandoned structures as possible. Recent articles in area media have mentioned the possibility of putting all of that cleared land to use by erecting greenhouses to be used for farming purposes. In a way, this may not be a bad idea if the community is allowed to participate in the effort: it is a perfect way to mix together the urban landscape with one that leans towards nature. Only time will tell if this idea ever comes to fruition. Elsewhere in the city, a number of billionaires have been making efforts to rehabilitate some of Detroit's abandoned structures in hotels, civic centers, arenas, businesses and new housing areas. It is a commendable effort, although critics point out that these efforts are resulting in the destruction of historic structures that could have been saved for future generations to admire and reflect upon. The venerable Detroit Institute of Arts, after narrowly having seen it's assets sold off to pay off Detroit's creditors during the bankruptcy process, is growing in size and stature thanks to the help of some of Detroit's most affluent citizens who remain. Belle Isle, for it's part, is slowly undergoing a renovation after years of neglect, and there is an ongoing effort to build an outdoor park stretching along much of the Detroit River directly north of the downtown area. The Detroit Zoo also is beginning to see a second renaissance, as the region has pulled together to pour money into saving what many see as a valuable educational institution throughout southeastern Michigan.
Detroit's population declined to around 700,000 inhabitants from what the 2010 census found. However, a bright light can be found in that gloomy news. In the last few years, new census data has indicated that a good amount of younger individuals have chosen to make Detroit their new home. Among these people are aspiring artists, singers, young business professionals and a host of other progressive minded individuals who see the possibility of Detroit having a second Golden Era, just as it did in the 1950s and the 1960s. On the other end of this positive development, Detroit's pension system has since been changed to match the current population of the city to help ease the financial pains the city has endured as a result of decades of corrupt politicians being in charge of the city. On the job front, there appears to be some good news, as Ford and General Motors recently opened up plants within Detroit for the first time in nearly two decades. This came after the loss of American Axle, which had closed it's last remaining Detroit based plant down several years ago to relocate this plant's operations to another location in Mexico. Bolstering the job outlook in Detroit are Google's future plans to open up a large campus in Detroit, along with possible plans from Microsoft and several other major technology companies to follow suit. As for the city's police and fire services? Suffice it to say that Detroit no longer is the most violent city in America. One could almost say that between the new mayor, the actions taken by Kevyn Orr, the efforts led by the Justice Department, and James Craig, the new chief of police, a change for the better is floating through the air.
Detroit. A beautiful city, even with all of her scars. Detroit, an inspiration for change. Detroit: a city I am proud to have called my home. Detroit: an American story.
(Afterword: My latest post was not written with the intent to attack anyone living there. I wanted to highlight some of Detroit's history and the current outlook for Detroit. I, like anyone else who has close ties to Detroit and Michigan, felt immense pain in seeing the city suffer for years. Detroit, to me, was one of the largest factors in all of the state of Michigan. The people living there are truly among the most hardworking, dedicated, honest, loving, caring and wonderful people I know, and I am proud to call some of the people I personally know there my friends. Despite what anyone could or ever would say to me, I love Detroit. I miss seeing the sunrise over the city every day, and the sunset there every night. I miss the food, the sounds, the smells of that city...no matter if they were good or bad. I hope that you, dear reader, have learned something from this writing. My love for that place will never die no matter where I live at on this world for the rest of my life. While I do live in Colorado Springs at the moment, a place over a thousand miles from the place I know to be home, I will eventually move back. It's one of the most resilient cities on the planet, and it has seen it's fair share of great moments and dark moments throughout the years. It has made it over 300 years, and I hope Detroit will soldier on for another 300 years. If you have any thoughts, comments or questions, please feel free to write them below and I will respond as soon as I get the chance to. All I ask is that you please be civil and polite with your writing. Thank you again for reading this, and I'll see you all again on my next post.)
Thursday, November 12, 2015
Tuesday, November 10, 2015
Sage Advice From A Former TNC Driver
If you are a potential driver who is considering signing up for Lyft or Uber, please keep the following advice in mind:
1. If you become a part time driver, be aware that you will pay out quite a bit just on maintenance alone - make sure you have a reliable car that doesn't have a tendency to break down or is expensive even when the most simple of things goes wrong.
2. Be aware that you will come into contact with a lot of passengers who are intoxicated or high from different substances, the biggest ones being marijuana and alcohol. Exercise a high degree of caution with these people, as they can be very volatile. Additionally, invest in some vomit bags. You can get them from virtually any retail outlet.
3. Use caution in how you speak and act as well - many times passengers can be upset by the most innocuous of things, and will make you pay dearly through rating you poorly. This has happened to many of my fellow drivers out across the country that I still maintain contact with, and oftentimes they don't have a clue because the passengers act like everything is great. If you can, stick to sports or something mundane. Be courteous at all times as well unless absolutely necessary.
4. Know that, going into this, you will have to pay for a DMV medical exam and a state inspection of your vehicle in many parts of the country, as Lyft and Uber increasingly are having to abide by the rules put into place by regulatory agencies both at the city, county and state levels.
5. Invest in a dual USB charging port for your car - always have a charging cable on hand at all times both for Android based phones and iPhones as well. Passengers can and will rate you poorly if you do not have at least one of the other.
6. If necessary, contact each and every passenger at the start of a ride to obtain their accurate location. Experience dictates that people as a rule do not read, and as a result do not put in any kind of pickup address, business or even a destination address. Many seem to assume that TNC providers operate exactly like a taxi service, and any attempts to dissuade passengers of this mentality has resulted in poor ratings for many drivers nationwide.
7. If you are in a more rural or smaller market with no other major cities within a short driving distance, do not pursue Lyft or Uber as a full time job. It is financially not worth it. Use it as a side gig if you already possess a part time job or a full time job, but be aware that the payout each week may not be what you think it is.
8. Invest in a dash-cam, and if allowed to, pepper spray. You never know when you will have a violent or disruptive passenger, and in case of an accident, a dash-cam could potentially clear your name.
9. If you wish to do so, provide candy, mints, gum or water. It does help to improve the ratings of some drivers, but not all. Do this at your own discretion.
10. Always memorize the locations of local law enforcement agencies. Keep their numbers in your phone on speed dial. You never know when you may need their help. Also, memorize all of the safe locations that are brightly lit and have high traffic near them in your area in case you need to kick someone out of your car. These will be your designated safe zones. If you are unable to find either one in time, be constantly on the lookout for areas a law enforcement patrol unit may frequent. This will help protect you even further in the event that you may be at risk with respect to personal safety.
11. If you so choose to, invest in an emergency first aid kit. You never know when a passenger might experience a medical emergency. It also goes without saying that it is not a bad idea to be certified in emergency first aid and CPR through either the American Red Cross or the American Heart Association. These things may come in handy for when a passenger experiences medical distress and help is several minutes away.
12. Document every dollar spent that is to be used towards your gig as a driver with Uber and Lyft. Use a smartphone app, use Excel spreadsheet, keep all of your receipts of purchases made while logged into driver mode and any repairs or cleaning done to your vehicle that directly relate to working as a driver for Uber, Lyft or any other similar company. The best website you could use is SherpaShare, if you choose to go that route. Also make sure to document all of your miles driven while logged in as a driver - you will need all of the above items come tax time, as you do not get any tax forms from either company unless you gross over $20,000 a year from driving. Account for every last dollar, or the IRS may audit you.
13. Allow the passengers to choose what kind of music they want to listen to, if they prefer to. If they simply wish to be left alone in peace for the duration of the ride, respect that.
14. This final piece of advice may come across as a promotional bit, but I advise you, potential driver, to follow The Rideshare Guy on Facebook or at his personal website at http://www.therideshareguy.com. He's been an advocate for us drivers since beginning his website, and oftentimes has useful tips for drivers that may help you out, depending on what kind of a market you live in. He has many, many resources to help drivers try to increase their income (again this truly depends on what kind of a city you live in - personal opinion here), along with many, many other resources to help you not only improve as a driver but also to save money on your expenses. Once more, follow him - he's the only one serving as a voice, and as a beacon of light, for the driving community as a whole.
Consider well everything I outlined above, and best of luck to you as a new driver if you pursue it. Above all, don't let yourself get sucked into the black hole I found myself in (I live in a smaller community with poor demand - took a year plus a bankruptcy to convince me to get out of driving). Be smart with what you are doing as a driver, and don't let yourself be blinded by glitzy advertising that promises you untold riches by companies offering independent contracting work. Play it smart, and you'll do okay. Good night, and good luck.
1. If you become a part time driver, be aware that you will pay out quite a bit just on maintenance alone - make sure you have a reliable car that doesn't have a tendency to break down or is expensive even when the most simple of things goes wrong.
2. Be aware that you will come into contact with a lot of passengers who are intoxicated or high from different substances, the biggest ones being marijuana and alcohol. Exercise a high degree of caution with these people, as they can be very volatile. Additionally, invest in some vomit bags. You can get them from virtually any retail outlet.
3. Use caution in how you speak and act as well - many times passengers can be upset by the most innocuous of things, and will make you pay dearly through rating you poorly. This has happened to many of my fellow drivers out across the country that I still maintain contact with, and oftentimes they don't have a clue because the passengers act like everything is great. If you can, stick to sports or something mundane. Be courteous at all times as well unless absolutely necessary.
4. Know that, going into this, you will have to pay for a DMV medical exam and a state inspection of your vehicle in many parts of the country, as Lyft and Uber increasingly are having to abide by the rules put into place by regulatory agencies both at the city, county and state levels.
5. Invest in a dual USB charging port for your car - always have a charging cable on hand at all times both for Android based phones and iPhones as well. Passengers can and will rate you poorly if you do not have at least one of the other.
6. If necessary, contact each and every passenger at the start of a ride to obtain their accurate location. Experience dictates that people as a rule do not read, and as a result do not put in any kind of pickup address, business or even a destination address. Many seem to assume that TNC providers operate exactly like a taxi service, and any attempts to dissuade passengers of this mentality has resulted in poor ratings for many drivers nationwide.
7. If you are in a more rural or smaller market with no other major cities within a short driving distance, do not pursue Lyft or Uber as a full time job. It is financially not worth it. Use it as a side gig if you already possess a part time job or a full time job, but be aware that the payout each week may not be what you think it is.
8. Invest in a dash-cam, and if allowed to, pepper spray. You never know when you will have a violent or disruptive passenger, and in case of an accident, a dash-cam could potentially clear your name.
9. If you wish to do so, provide candy, mints, gum or water. It does help to improve the ratings of some drivers, but not all. Do this at your own discretion.
10. Always memorize the locations of local law enforcement agencies. Keep their numbers in your phone on speed dial. You never know when you may need their help. Also, memorize all of the safe locations that are brightly lit and have high traffic near them in your area in case you need to kick someone out of your car. These will be your designated safe zones. If you are unable to find either one in time, be constantly on the lookout for areas a law enforcement patrol unit may frequent. This will help protect you even further in the event that you may be at risk with respect to personal safety.
11. If you so choose to, invest in an emergency first aid kit. You never know when a passenger might experience a medical emergency. It also goes without saying that it is not a bad idea to be certified in emergency first aid and CPR through either the American Red Cross or the American Heart Association. These things may come in handy for when a passenger experiences medical distress and help is several minutes away.
12. Document every dollar spent that is to be used towards your gig as a driver with Uber and Lyft. Use a smartphone app, use Excel spreadsheet, keep all of your receipts of purchases made while logged into driver mode and any repairs or cleaning done to your vehicle that directly relate to working as a driver for Uber, Lyft or any other similar company. The best website you could use is SherpaShare, if you choose to go that route. Also make sure to document all of your miles driven while logged in as a driver - you will need all of the above items come tax time, as you do not get any tax forms from either company unless you gross over $20,000 a year from driving. Account for every last dollar, or the IRS may audit you.
13. Allow the passengers to choose what kind of music they want to listen to, if they prefer to. If they simply wish to be left alone in peace for the duration of the ride, respect that.
14. This final piece of advice may come across as a promotional bit, but I advise you, potential driver, to follow The Rideshare Guy on Facebook or at his personal website at http://www.therideshareguy.com. He's been an advocate for us drivers since beginning his website, and oftentimes has useful tips for drivers that may help you out, depending on what kind of a market you live in. He has many, many resources to help drivers try to increase their income (again this truly depends on what kind of a city you live in - personal opinion here), along with many, many other resources to help you not only improve as a driver but also to save money on your expenses. Once more, follow him - he's the only one serving as a voice, and as a beacon of light, for the driving community as a whole.
Consider well everything I outlined above, and best of luck to you as a new driver if you pursue it. Above all, don't let yourself get sucked into the black hole I found myself in (I live in a smaller community with poor demand - took a year plus a bankruptcy to convince me to get out of driving). Be smart with what you are doing as a driver, and don't let yourself be blinded by glitzy advertising that promises you untold riches by companies offering independent contracting work. Play it smart, and you'll do okay. Good night, and good luck.
Friday, October 2, 2015
The Most Evil Influence In The World
Money. It's something a lot of people work to earn. It's a thing a lot of people dream about amassing in vast amounts. It has been a concept that has been around since the earliest written records first appeared on the scene thousands of years ago. From the look of things, it doesn't appear to be going away any time soon.
I'm not going to lie, here. Growing up, my family never had that much money. There was enough to keep food on the table. Certainly, enough to keep a roof over our heads and clothes on our backs. I am grateful for that. But for all of these years I have been around, I have noticed a trend. A trend that, at one time, was almost socially unacceptable in society. I'm sure you all can remember those rich kids you vaguely knew from your years in school. They all seemed to have the nicest, flashiest things: clothes, jewelry, cars, even a large home. They seemed to have everything going for them, and they all tended to be the most popular kids in school, the trendsetters, if you will. Always active in sports, whether it was in basketball, football, volleyball, baseball, softball or even track. You'd see these same kids in the finest clothes you had ever seen in church every Sunday, too, provided that was something you did with your own family. Or, provided you even went to the same church as they did, or even lived in the same neighborhood you did. I certainly can recall plenty of kids like that in some of the towns I lived in over the years.
Yet, for all of those memories, something always seemed to be off. Come Friday and Saturday nights after the game ended at the local high school, they were the quickest to launch debauched parties in their McMansions. Many of these so-called popular rich kids turned out to be the biggest snobs at school, looking down on those from a lower class, sneering and laughing at them for their hand-me-down clothing, for living in a smaller home, for having a rust bucket of a car. Come Sunday, they would be pious, no doubt. They would proclaim how much they loved Jesus, almost at times trying to shout each other out while singing those hymns the pastor had selected for that morning. They certainly acted pious, did their best to appear innocent, as their school-sponsored Bible clubs would be out front early every weekday morning, praying in a giant circle around the flag out front. For years, I wondered if it truly was their religion that made them this way, and I would as a result condemn all of those who had a belief in some deity because of those memories. But, as time progressed, I began to pay attention.
Almost everyone alive today can recall the recessions that rocked the country in the 1970s and the 1980s. Everyone alive can recount the dot com bubble burst around 2001, the housing bubble burst around 2006, and no one can dispute the epic throttling the economy received in 2008 as a result of Wall Street's almost criminal actions. Throughout the last 15 years alone, I can distinctly recall how much wealthier the rich seemed to get, while the rest of us in the middle class were pushed further and further down the ladder, our wages barely increasing while the cost of living for us just seemed to skyrocket further and further, with no signs of this trend ever ending even today. I can recall all those years how, as I rode my old bike around my home town to get to wherever it was I was going to (or as I was on foot), I would see a group of rich kids pass me by and shout derogatory words at me for being on foot or on bike, while they cruised around in the latest, fanciest car they could get their hands on. I can't lie about this part, either: a lot of times, it made me seethe. Who were they to judge me for not having what they did? I can even remember the first time I went to seek assistance with keeping food on the table. The shame and humiliation I felt walking out with all of that paperwork was incredible, as some of these rich kids I knew would walk by me, seeing the paperwork in my hands, and glaring directly at me, gesturing angrily in my direction, while they spoke to each other in frenzied, hushed tones as they walked towards the local DMV office just down the hall from DHS. While I couldn't hear what they were saying, the implication by their body language alone was more than enough: how dare this person steal our taxes to live for free off of our inherited wealth?
Increasingly, I would eventually see some of these same rich people I once went to school with as they would walk into political rallies organized by the GOP in my area. I was always on the side of the protestors there, those who stood against war, unfettered greed, racism, religious bigotry, sexism and homophobia. I would see these rich kids as they walked by me. They would shout at me for being a low class lazy bum out for a free handout, that I needed to go to school and learn. Again, I would seethe, as after high school, their parents had virtually ensured that they received a free ride into a prestigious university, while I was not afforded any such opportunities. I would seethe as I saw everyone in my class on the economic ladder get left behind, as men and women with almost untold, vast amounts of wealth would march into their churches every Sunday, offering up false praise to a god who would never recognize them as followers of him, and the rest of the week they would spend on things no normal person would ever need, ignoring the plight of the hungry, the poor, the homeless in the world. And in time, a few former friends I knew to be once poor ended up like these same rich kids as they became wealthy quite by accident. Gone were the delightful, enlightening conversations I had with them. Instead, the words I heard come from their mouths were words condemning those of us still living with little to our names. Gone were the good, honest people I once knew and loved, replaced by people focused utterly on obtaining more wealth, their sole argument on how to do so based on this idea that taxing the poor was the solution. This idea that cheaper production would bring in more money. Even today, I mourn the loss of those friendships, and I am left with one overriding conclusion that is like a bitter pill to swallow.
It's not religion that corrupts those who are wealthy. It's not politics. It's money itself. Too much of it, in my experience and in the experiences of those, can change a person for the worst. You become deaf to the suffering of those who are less fortunate. You begin to view them as leeches, out to get your money, and all because you do not want to pay anything out that will go towards them. You begin to think that if only they did it like you, then they would do okay, but they're not wealthy, so you assume that it is all laziness on their part, that they just want to sit back and have everything handed to them for free. In time, if you are a religious person, you find yourself seeing statements within your religious scriptures that you come to believe actually hold you up as your god's favored type of human being, simply because you are wealthy, while others who have less are clearly unforgivable sinners. If you're the head of a major company with untold billions to your name, you become angry with your own workers when they ask for a higher wage. You think to yourself why the hell should I, I want to keep even more of this money? They didn't do what you did to get this rich, the hell with them. Besides, it should be easy for them to live off of what they make, I know I could!
The problem with thinking like that is that it leads down a much darker path. In terms of religion, almost every major religion humanity has condemns the wealthy who do not minister to the poor, who are their own brethren. From an economic standpoint, it is a dangerous line of thinking, as simply assuming it should be easy to live off of very little is foolish, considering how low wages simply do not afford the opportunity to save up for anything, and how even the simplest illness can put one's well-being at high risk. A few days off to recover from the flu when you are a poor worker can spell utter financial disaster for you, and yet the rich do not take that into consideration. Their line of thinking, because of the influence of money, is so far removed from the common person that any counter argument you make with them falls onto deaf ears. Often times, they don't even appear to consider other basic necessities when assuming that a person could live off of a few hundred a month easily. They almost seem to think a Spartan, austere existence without access to any of what drives the world that is necessary today should be easy, and when a worker asks for a higher wage, they think hey, this person should manage their money better, why should I give them any more of mine? It betrays a thought process that indicates that the wealthy simply do not consider the mountain of problems the poor are forced to endure because of their problem. The fact that Doctors Without Borders is in many communities nationwide in what is supposed to be the world's wealthiest nation speaks volumes to this truth. Some wealthy individuals even think to themselves how if only they could privatize our social service system...they think that their experience running one business makes them qualified for it, and as a bonus, it would be more money in their pockets. Not once do those in favor of this appear to care that privatization by a company only interested in the money would result in an even higher cost for food, for clothing, for the basic necessities in life. It would make the problem worse, and for the wealthy involved with that kind of advocacy, that kind of thinking, the bigger picture doesn't matter to them. They can only think of more money flowing into their bank accounts, and in time, the people they draw this money off of them are merely monetary tools, not living, breathing human beings with feelings, with dreams, with hopes, with very real fears. Small wonder we are seeing a Pope, a man well known for working in the slums in his home country out of a need to address poverty, attack the very wealthy who claim to be followers of a man who was utterly opposed to obscene wealth 2,000 years ago.
And this is where I leave off. I leave it to you to deduce your own conclusions. Attack me if you must, or agree, I don't care. But, consider what I have laid out here. Consider well what you have seen with your own eyes what the wealthy do and say. If you don't wish to do that, or even believe this next underlying truth, than that is your prerogative. In any event, I say this: money is the most corrupting influence in the history of humanity. It is the most corrupting influence on the planet Earth. And I will maintain hope that one day, humanity's goals will not involve the pursuit of unlimited wealth. It blinds you to the human condition. It robs you of your ability to reason, of your ability to use logic in your thinking, of your very being. It can make you judge people for not having money while it may very well be that they never had a choice in the matter. It can corrupt you to the point where democracy, an ideal cherished by so many millions upon the globe, is a barrier to you in your quest to obtain even more wealth no matter what the means. Money, quite simply, robs you of your humanity. And should you continue to call yourself a Christian, even as you go against the very words of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, a well known supporter of the poor and the destitute, you may have reason to stop and reconsider exactly what religion you belong to, as the very founder of your religion would condemn you as strongly as he once did the Pharisees and the money changers in the temple. Money, above all, is evil. I can only hope we eventually move beyond the need for it, and start taking care of one another without asking first for a price. It's the least we can do - we only have one home in the cosmos, after all, and all we have is one another to rely upon. It's time to stop looking at money as the sole objective.
Until next time, my friends.
I'm not going to lie, here. Growing up, my family never had that much money. There was enough to keep food on the table. Certainly, enough to keep a roof over our heads and clothes on our backs. I am grateful for that. But for all of these years I have been around, I have noticed a trend. A trend that, at one time, was almost socially unacceptable in society. I'm sure you all can remember those rich kids you vaguely knew from your years in school. They all seemed to have the nicest, flashiest things: clothes, jewelry, cars, even a large home. They seemed to have everything going for them, and they all tended to be the most popular kids in school, the trendsetters, if you will. Always active in sports, whether it was in basketball, football, volleyball, baseball, softball or even track. You'd see these same kids in the finest clothes you had ever seen in church every Sunday, too, provided that was something you did with your own family. Or, provided you even went to the same church as they did, or even lived in the same neighborhood you did. I certainly can recall plenty of kids like that in some of the towns I lived in over the years.
Yet, for all of those memories, something always seemed to be off. Come Friday and Saturday nights after the game ended at the local high school, they were the quickest to launch debauched parties in their McMansions. Many of these so-called popular rich kids turned out to be the biggest snobs at school, looking down on those from a lower class, sneering and laughing at them for their hand-me-down clothing, for living in a smaller home, for having a rust bucket of a car. Come Sunday, they would be pious, no doubt. They would proclaim how much they loved Jesus, almost at times trying to shout each other out while singing those hymns the pastor had selected for that morning. They certainly acted pious, did their best to appear innocent, as their school-sponsored Bible clubs would be out front early every weekday morning, praying in a giant circle around the flag out front. For years, I wondered if it truly was their religion that made them this way, and I would as a result condemn all of those who had a belief in some deity because of those memories. But, as time progressed, I began to pay attention.
Almost everyone alive today can recall the recessions that rocked the country in the 1970s and the 1980s. Everyone alive can recount the dot com bubble burst around 2001, the housing bubble burst around 2006, and no one can dispute the epic throttling the economy received in 2008 as a result of Wall Street's almost criminal actions. Throughout the last 15 years alone, I can distinctly recall how much wealthier the rich seemed to get, while the rest of us in the middle class were pushed further and further down the ladder, our wages barely increasing while the cost of living for us just seemed to skyrocket further and further, with no signs of this trend ever ending even today. I can recall all those years how, as I rode my old bike around my home town to get to wherever it was I was going to (or as I was on foot), I would see a group of rich kids pass me by and shout derogatory words at me for being on foot or on bike, while they cruised around in the latest, fanciest car they could get their hands on. I can't lie about this part, either: a lot of times, it made me seethe. Who were they to judge me for not having what they did? I can even remember the first time I went to seek assistance with keeping food on the table. The shame and humiliation I felt walking out with all of that paperwork was incredible, as some of these rich kids I knew would walk by me, seeing the paperwork in my hands, and glaring directly at me, gesturing angrily in my direction, while they spoke to each other in frenzied, hushed tones as they walked towards the local DMV office just down the hall from DHS. While I couldn't hear what they were saying, the implication by their body language alone was more than enough: how dare this person steal our taxes to live for free off of our inherited wealth?
Increasingly, I would eventually see some of these same rich people I once went to school with as they would walk into political rallies organized by the GOP in my area. I was always on the side of the protestors there, those who stood against war, unfettered greed, racism, religious bigotry, sexism and homophobia. I would see these rich kids as they walked by me. They would shout at me for being a low class lazy bum out for a free handout, that I needed to go to school and learn. Again, I would seethe, as after high school, their parents had virtually ensured that they received a free ride into a prestigious university, while I was not afforded any such opportunities. I would seethe as I saw everyone in my class on the economic ladder get left behind, as men and women with almost untold, vast amounts of wealth would march into their churches every Sunday, offering up false praise to a god who would never recognize them as followers of him, and the rest of the week they would spend on things no normal person would ever need, ignoring the plight of the hungry, the poor, the homeless in the world. And in time, a few former friends I knew to be once poor ended up like these same rich kids as they became wealthy quite by accident. Gone were the delightful, enlightening conversations I had with them. Instead, the words I heard come from their mouths were words condemning those of us still living with little to our names. Gone were the good, honest people I once knew and loved, replaced by people focused utterly on obtaining more wealth, their sole argument on how to do so based on this idea that taxing the poor was the solution. This idea that cheaper production would bring in more money. Even today, I mourn the loss of those friendships, and I am left with one overriding conclusion that is like a bitter pill to swallow.
It's not religion that corrupts those who are wealthy. It's not politics. It's money itself. Too much of it, in my experience and in the experiences of those, can change a person for the worst. You become deaf to the suffering of those who are less fortunate. You begin to view them as leeches, out to get your money, and all because you do not want to pay anything out that will go towards them. You begin to think that if only they did it like you, then they would do okay, but they're not wealthy, so you assume that it is all laziness on their part, that they just want to sit back and have everything handed to them for free. In time, if you are a religious person, you find yourself seeing statements within your religious scriptures that you come to believe actually hold you up as your god's favored type of human being, simply because you are wealthy, while others who have less are clearly unforgivable sinners. If you're the head of a major company with untold billions to your name, you become angry with your own workers when they ask for a higher wage. You think to yourself why the hell should I, I want to keep even more of this money? They didn't do what you did to get this rich, the hell with them. Besides, it should be easy for them to live off of what they make, I know I could!
The problem with thinking like that is that it leads down a much darker path. In terms of religion, almost every major religion humanity has condemns the wealthy who do not minister to the poor, who are their own brethren. From an economic standpoint, it is a dangerous line of thinking, as simply assuming it should be easy to live off of very little is foolish, considering how low wages simply do not afford the opportunity to save up for anything, and how even the simplest illness can put one's well-being at high risk. A few days off to recover from the flu when you are a poor worker can spell utter financial disaster for you, and yet the rich do not take that into consideration. Their line of thinking, because of the influence of money, is so far removed from the common person that any counter argument you make with them falls onto deaf ears. Often times, they don't even appear to consider other basic necessities when assuming that a person could live off of a few hundred a month easily. They almost seem to think a Spartan, austere existence without access to any of what drives the world that is necessary today should be easy, and when a worker asks for a higher wage, they think hey, this person should manage their money better, why should I give them any more of mine? It betrays a thought process that indicates that the wealthy simply do not consider the mountain of problems the poor are forced to endure because of their problem. The fact that Doctors Without Borders is in many communities nationwide in what is supposed to be the world's wealthiest nation speaks volumes to this truth. Some wealthy individuals even think to themselves how if only they could privatize our social service system...they think that their experience running one business makes them qualified for it, and as a bonus, it would be more money in their pockets. Not once do those in favor of this appear to care that privatization by a company only interested in the money would result in an even higher cost for food, for clothing, for the basic necessities in life. It would make the problem worse, and for the wealthy involved with that kind of advocacy, that kind of thinking, the bigger picture doesn't matter to them. They can only think of more money flowing into their bank accounts, and in time, the people they draw this money off of them are merely monetary tools, not living, breathing human beings with feelings, with dreams, with hopes, with very real fears. Small wonder we are seeing a Pope, a man well known for working in the slums in his home country out of a need to address poverty, attack the very wealthy who claim to be followers of a man who was utterly opposed to obscene wealth 2,000 years ago.
And this is where I leave off. I leave it to you to deduce your own conclusions. Attack me if you must, or agree, I don't care. But, consider what I have laid out here. Consider well what you have seen with your own eyes what the wealthy do and say. If you don't wish to do that, or even believe this next underlying truth, than that is your prerogative. In any event, I say this: money is the most corrupting influence in the history of humanity. It is the most corrupting influence on the planet Earth. And I will maintain hope that one day, humanity's goals will not involve the pursuit of unlimited wealth. It blinds you to the human condition. It robs you of your ability to reason, of your ability to use logic in your thinking, of your very being. It can make you judge people for not having money while it may very well be that they never had a choice in the matter. It can corrupt you to the point where democracy, an ideal cherished by so many millions upon the globe, is a barrier to you in your quest to obtain even more wealth no matter what the means. Money, quite simply, robs you of your humanity. And should you continue to call yourself a Christian, even as you go against the very words of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, a well known supporter of the poor and the destitute, you may have reason to stop and reconsider exactly what religion you belong to, as the very founder of your religion would condemn you as strongly as he once did the Pharisees and the money changers in the temple. Money, above all, is evil. I can only hope we eventually move beyond the need for it, and start taking care of one another without asking first for a price. It's the least we can do - we only have one home in the cosmos, after all, and all we have is one another to rely upon. It's time to stop looking at money as the sole objective.
Until next time, my friends.
Monday, July 27, 2015
It's Personal
A few nights ago, I found myself yet again sitting in the car downtown. It was just after 2 in the morning, and everything was dying down. I hadn't had any other passenger requests for about 30 minutes, and was waiting to see if I would get any late night stragglers from some of the nearby diners. I pulled up in front of the Red Martini, and stood waiting outside of my car for another request. Nearby were several employees from at least two of the nearby bars, and walking around them was a homeless man. What I saw disgusted me.
I mentioned in my first post here that I was homeless at one point in my life. It was the most difficult challenge I have ever faced, and even today I still have emotional problems stemming from that period of my life. It's not an easy situation to be in, and I wouldn't wish it upon even my worse enemy in the world. The way you get treated when you are homeless can go three ways: one, you may get treated as if you're an addict who needs Jesus in your life. And maybe that is the case for some out there, but not all. Two, you're treated with scorn and distaste, almost as if your very presence is not welcome in any place you go to. Three, you may actually get treated with compassion and dignity. It all depends on where you are at. In the area I lived in, it was like I didn't even exist at all. One of the shelters I spent a night at fell into the first category. I was simply trying to eat when one of the staff came up to me, offering me a spot in their drug and alcohol program. The tone this man used when talking to me was the same one a person would use when talking to a child. Needless to say, that kind of treatment didn't go over well with me, and I never again went back to this place. Still others in this particular city just wrote me off as though I wasn't human. It's no small wonder many on the streets end up turning to drugs or alcohol. Being homeless sucks.
This brings me back to the other night. There I was in my car, and watching this man, who may have been on some sort of substance or quite possibly mentally ill (the latter seemed to be the case). He kept walking around this group of people, exchanging hostile words with the security guard in the midst of this group. He kept daring this guard to come hit him, and just throwing out a litany of insults. Again, this individual was very likely a mentally ill person - I had certainly seen enough of it back in Grand Rapids, but at least there they had several non-profit places that offered treatment for men like this guy free of charge. This guard, if he could truly be called that, was replying with an equal barrage of insults. There was one that really got to me, though: "Go on home! Oh, that's right, you don't have a home!" This guard then laughed after saying this. For a brief moment, I considered saying something to this gentleman about that statement. I considered saying to him to go easy on the guy, let the police at least handle it. They at least have a team that is trained specifically to handle homeless issues here in Colorado Springs. Another part of me also considered asking him if he would do the same had he known I was on the streets at one point in time, too. Witnessing things like that, and knowing what it's like to live on the streets...honestly, to me, that's what I would call getting personal.
For the homeless here in Colorado Springs, there exist few options for housing. There is only one shelter that is open year round, and it is almost always at full capacity for both men and women. The staff there have touted some minor measures of success in helping shelter occupants to obtain a job and a home of their own, but the reality of the matter is that most of the people who rotate in and out of this place suffer from a plethora of issues: disabilities stemming from medical problems, mental health issues or even addiction. Two other shelters are seasonal: the first, Springs Rescue Mission, does offer a long-term drug and alcohol treatment program, but like many other places, it is frequented by the same individuals over and over again - their cold-weather shelter can hold maybe 35 individuals at best, and is open for a brief window of time from November to April. Many of these individuals are, of course, homeless, and have no real job prospects out there. They have nothing to offer to a world that refuses to see any remote potential in them. The other cold-weather shelter, operated by the Salvation Army, can house up to 150 people, but again is closed for much of the year. What real options, again, do these people have for housing?
The next problem is that once they are back on the streets during warmer months, there is little in the way for them as far as housing is concerned. The year-round shelter here actually forbids people from working at day labor jobs, which the staff there openly says is not "real work". Damn the fact that the only real job prospects many in Colorado Springs have is within minimum wage, part time fast food jobs or retail jobs. Once you're on the streets, almost every employer out there views you as unreliable simply because you do not have a place to call home. And even with the Marion House Soup Kitchen allowing people to use their place as a forwarding address for the homeless, that address, once pulled up in a background check by potential employers, is viewed as a huge red flag. Given the city's five plus year ban on camping, and more recent efforts by city officials to ban the homeless from at least trying to sleep on a park bench, it becomes obvious that Colorado Springs is a city that refuses to acknowledge that homelessness exists, almost seemingly equating it to a crime, despite the efforts of the Homeless Outreach Team with CSPD (admittedly it has to be said that reports exist of CSPD simply purchasing bus tickets to other cities for the homeless - such actions do not solve a thing).
On the question of jobs, yes, it is true that there is work to be found out there. But, as touched upon in the previous paragraph, most of the jobs one could find in this city primarily are within fast food and retail, both of which pay little and offer few hours (thanks partly to employers not wanting to give benefits to employees). And as the cost of living continues to skyrocket, partially due to the influx of people from other states due to marijuana being legal in Colorado, this puts a further squeeze on those who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless. One would have to work three or four jobs just to be able to make a stable living, but with most places being inflexible with their hours and those offered by a second job, what is a person truly left with? A life spent sleeping on different couches in different homes every few weeks, rotated between cheap hotels and shelters? And still, individuals comprising both of the above categories are told by our elected leaders to simply work harder, and nowhere more than right here in Colorado Springs.
All of what I just discussed above nearly came to a head for me the other night, as I watched the interaction between that security guard and that homeless man. A homeless man who, for his efforts, almost got pepper sprayed. Who, because absolutely no real resources exist in the city to treat whatever mental health problems he might have, nearly met the business end of a taser. I cannot stand attacks on the homeless. I cannot stand those who insult and demean them. To me, such things are personal. Because I too was homeless, and I want a world where such a problem doesn't exist.
I mentioned in my first post here that I was homeless at one point in my life. It was the most difficult challenge I have ever faced, and even today I still have emotional problems stemming from that period of my life. It's not an easy situation to be in, and I wouldn't wish it upon even my worse enemy in the world. The way you get treated when you are homeless can go three ways: one, you may get treated as if you're an addict who needs Jesus in your life. And maybe that is the case for some out there, but not all. Two, you're treated with scorn and distaste, almost as if your very presence is not welcome in any place you go to. Three, you may actually get treated with compassion and dignity. It all depends on where you are at. In the area I lived in, it was like I didn't even exist at all. One of the shelters I spent a night at fell into the first category. I was simply trying to eat when one of the staff came up to me, offering me a spot in their drug and alcohol program. The tone this man used when talking to me was the same one a person would use when talking to a child. Needless to say, that kind of treatment didn't go over well with me, and I never again went back to this place. Still others in this particular city just wrote me off as though I wasn't human. It's no small wonder many on the streets end up turning to drugs or alcohol. Being homeless sucks.
This brings me back to the other night. There I was in my car, and watching this man, who may have been on some sort of substance or quite possibly mentally ill (the latter seemed to be the case). He kept walking around this group of people, exchanging hostile words with the security guard in the midst of this group. He kept daring this guard to come hit him, and just throwing out a litany of insults. Again, this individual was very likely a mentally ill person - I had certainly seen enough of it back in Grand Rapids, but at least there they had several non-profit places that offered treatment for men like this guy free of charge. This guard, if he could truly be called that, was replying with an equal barrage of insults. There was one that really got to me, though: "Go on home! Oh, that's right, you don't have a home!" This guard then laughed after saying this. For a brief moment, I considered saying something to this gentleman about that statement. I considered saying to him to go easy on the guy, let the police at least handle it. They at least have a team that is trained specifically to handle homeless issues here in Colorado Springs. Another part of me also considered asking him if he would do the same had he known I was on the streets at one point in time, too. Witnessing things like that, and knowing what it's like to live on the streets...honestly, to me, that's what I would call getting personal.
For the homeless here in Colorado Springs, there exist few options for housing. There is only one shelter that is open year round, and it is almost always at full capacity for both men and women. The staff there have touted some minor measures of success in helping shelter occupants to obtain a job and a home of their own, but the reality of the matter is that most of the people who rotate in and out of this place suffer from a plethora of issues: disabilities stemming from medical problems, mental health issues or even addiction. Two other shelters are seasonal: the first, Springs Rescue Mission, does offer a long-term drug and alcohol treatment program, but like many other places, it is frequented by the same individuals over and over again - their cold-weather shelter can hold maybe 35 individuals at best, and is open for a brief window of time from November to April. Many of these individuals are, of course, homeless, and have no real job prospects out there. They have nothing to offer to a world that refuses to see any remote potential in them. The other cold-weather shelter, operated by the Salvation Army, can house up to 150 people, but again is closed for much of the year. What real options, again, do these people have for housing?
The next problem is that once they are back on the streets during warmer months, there is little in the way for them as far as housing is concerned. The year-round shelter here actually forbids people from working at day labor jobs, which the staff there openly says is not "real work". Damn the fact that the only real job prospects many in Colorado Springs have is within minimum wage, part time fast food jobs or retail jobs. Once you're on the streets, almost every employer out there views you as unreliable simply because you do not have a place to call home. And even with the Marion House Soup Kitchen allowing people to use their place as a forwarding address for the homeless, that address, once pulled up in a background check by potential employers, is viewed as a huge red flag. Given the city's five plus year ban on camping, and more recent efforts by city officials to ban the homeless from at least trying to sleep on a park bench, it becomes obvious that Colorado Springs is a city that refuses to acknowledge that homelessness exists, almost seemingly equating it to a crime, despite the efforts of the Homeless Outreach Team with CSPD (admittedly it has to be said that reports exist of CSPD simply purchasing bus tickets to other cities for the homeless - such actions do not solve a thing).
On the question of jobs, yes, it is true that there is work to be found out there. But, as touched upon in the previous paragraph, most of the jobs one could find in this city primarily are within fast food and retail, both of which pay little and offer few hours (thanks partly to employers not wanting to give benefits to employees). And as the cost of living continues to skyrocket, partially due to the influx of people from other states due to marijuana being legal in Colorado, this puts a further squeeze on those who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless. One would have to work three or four jobs just to be able to make a stable living, but with most places being inflexible with their hours and those offered by a second job, what is a person truly left with? A life spent sleeping on different couches in different homes every few weeks, rotated between cheap hotels and shelters? And still, individuals comprising both of the above categories are told by our elected leaders to simply work harder, and nowhere more than right here in Colorado Springs.
All of what I just discussed above nearly came to a head for me the other night, as I watched the interaction between that security guard and that homeless man. A homeless man who, for his efforts, almost got pepper sprayed. Who, because absolutely no real resources exist in the city to treat whatever mental health problems he might have, nearly met the business end of a taser. I cannot stand attacks on the homeless. I cannot stand those who insult and demean them. To me, such things are personal. Because I too was homeless, and I want a world where such a problem doesn't exist.
Thursday, July 23, 2015
Shills for President
For the past few months, I have been watching as the race for next year's elections turns into more and more of a madhouse. The GOP candidates alone are all part of what I can only sum up as a virtual clown car: Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, Lindsey Graham, Mike Huckabee, Bobby Jindal, Rand Paul, Rick Santorum, Donald Trump and Scott Walker, just to name a few. On the Democratic side, you have Hillary Clinton, Jim Webb, Lincoln Chaffee, Martin O'Malley and Bernie Sanders. Almost all, with the exception of Bernie Sanders, simply do not get what's wrong with the country as a whole.
Take a look around your community at this moment in time. How does it look? Are you in a wealthy area? Then you have no real worries, I suppose. But for the bulk of Americans, what is the new norm out there? Roads that are in bad need of repair. Bridges that are almost in danger of falling apart. Schools that have a very limited budget compared to what they had decades ago, with the major end result being that most graduates of our school system are woefully unprepared where the sciences, literacy, mathematics and even basic knowledge of civics are concerned. A healthcare system that, for better or for worse, continues to lag far behind those of much of western Europe. A job market that increasingly is becoming more and more loaded with part time, minimum wage jobs in the service sector. An environment in a rather rough shape. Entire cities filled with abandoned homes and businesses (Detroit comes to mind here). All across the board, things do not look good, and in turn we look to those running for office for answers. Sadly, almost no one gets it.
Jeb Bush's solution to our economic woes is to "work harder". Work harder...advice that is being given to millions out there who are already working three, four jobs just to earn a living as the wage stagnates and the cost of living continues to skyrocket to unfathomable levels not seen in nearly a century. Donald Trump's ideas so far have consisted of erecting a wall along the entire southern border of the United States, and attacking John McCain as not being a "hero" for getting captured in Vietnam. Ted Cruz and Scott Walker seem to be focused on cutting everything in sight: food assistance programs meant to help the working poor keep food on the table, social security benefits for the elderly and the disabled, welfare programs aimed at helping small families be able to at least keep up with some bills while they search for work (and purchasing basic necessities for the house)...both of them seem to place the blame on immigrants, socialists and everyone else they can think of. Walker, for his part, we already know hates unions: just a few years ago, he barely made it through what could be described as a very tainted recall election, having attacked teacher's unions in Wisconsin and winning. As for Ben Carson? No real ideas to contribute, other than the fact that he apparently thinks being in prison makes you gay. And Santorum? I think little else needs to be said there.
On the opposite side, none of the people aside from Sanders seem to get that the main problems with our country lie solely with Wall Street. Clinton has addressed it to a degree, but again, all but one of the individuals running on the Democratic ticket for 2016 come across as corporate shills. It's almost like a choice between the lesser of two evils: the Republicans, who make it clear that their loyalties lie with multi-billion dollar corporations on Wall Street and elsewhere, and the Democrats, who at least try to hide it. Take as an example "Obamacare", or better known as the PPACA (Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act). The conservative right has been spitting venom for almost 6 years now on this monster of a law, blaming the President for forcing Americans to buy insurance that they feel they don't need. The political left (where I hail from) defends this law as the best thing to ever happen in our healthcare system. The reality, though, is that the PPACA doesn't exactly benefit us as taxpayers, even though millions of poor out there are actually able to get at least Medicaid because of the PPACA for quite possibly the first time, or at a minimum at least get credits that can be put towards health insurance plans. The PPACA, originally intended to be an act that would have created a single payer, universal health care system in this country, was hijacked by the health insurance industry. The same industry who in turn pressured both political parties in Congress to rewrite it so that no matter what, they would end up with even more customers in their respective systems. And more customers as we all know equals what, exactly? More money.
From there, it gets worse. Aside from a few people in Congress, almost everyone in both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party voted wholesale for the 2008 bailouts of some of Wall Street's biggest banks, and all at our expense as taxpayers. We weren't even given a choice, as the justification was that if we let banks that are too big to fail go under, then the rest of the economy will crash with them. Never mind the fact that someone could have introduced a law, or at least tried to, that would have broke up these banks just for that specific purpose. Same goes for voting for the Patriot Act, likely the greatest threat to the Bill of Rights in the entire history of the United States - a majority within both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party consciously continue to renew the Patriot Act at every turn, oftentimes granting more power to the NSA to spy on US citizens without so much as probable cause. It is true that this has been going on for decades now, but not at the obscene levels we are seeing today. And as for higher education? The record number of students in extreme debt from pursuing an education is simply unsustainable, and the fact that we have not followed the leads of our so-called European partners with respect to publicly funded, tuition free colleges and universities is simply mind boggling. And only two, perhaps three members of our own Congress have even tried to put a stop to this.
On care for veterans alone, the record there is very abysmal, and it has been throughout every presidential administration dating back to Ronald Reagan. Poorly maintained and unsafe medical facilities for veterans and active duty personnel...numerous cuts made to military personnel pay to such an extreme degree where it is not all that uncommon to see members of our own military selling their own blood plasma at for-profit "donation" centers throughout the nation...extreme and hurtful cuts done to veteran's benefits, veteran's assistance programs and care programs by, more often than not, Republicans (although the Democrats do share some guilt in this matter, by and large these cuts have been made by Republicans both in Congress and in the White House over the past few decades)...the list almost never seems to end, and yet somehow the money for fruitless military projects known to not work even by the very people proposing them is not a problem. Somehow, there's always money to wage another war that accomplishes nothing aside from obtaining new ways for private corporations to make more money. It is maddening that pitifully few members of our own Congress have even spoken up about these issues.
On another front, there's the matter of prison reform. In numerous states nationwide, the majority of offenders locked up are first time non-violent drug addicts. Again, there is little real discussion towards reforms there, as the cost to us taxpayers alone continues to skyrocket from housing these offenders for longer and longer terms. While the Democratic Party at least tries to have a discussion on the matter, even if it always is trivial in nature and never accomplishes anything, increasingly it is becoming clearer with each passing year: most state correctional agencies are beginning to produce goods for sale on the general market, with the sole source of labor being these same inmates who are sentenced to decades behind bars for the imagined crime of addiction. Nothing real is being done to actually address the issues of drug use from a medical perspective, and to see that these people are being sent into a lifetime behind bars to serve an increasingly for-profit prison system is utter madness. And again, with the exception of perhaps one of the candidates for the office of President for next year, no one else is discussing this. Instead, the clown car that is the Republican Party is obsessing over the imagined evil of gay marriage, Iran (which, let's face it, is relatively toothless compared to what the United States militarily is capable of), abortion and tax breaks for the rich - as if we need more of that. And the Democratic candidates, as a rule, almost seem to be silent.
Now, in the interests of fairness and disclosure, I will readily admit that I personally am a supporter of Bernie Sanders. He, along with a few other like-minded individuals, has been saying the same thing for decades: that we are kowtowing way too much to what the private sector wants. We've already allowed them to control our elections through the ability to pour in unlimited funds into any candidate's campaign of their choosing (think Citizen's United - it turned our democracy into a joke). We allowed them to virtually dictate a war no one asked for with Iraq. We allowed them to strip away good paying American jobs in the manufacturing sector and the tech sector, the rationale being that it's cheaper (and somehow better) to relocate to nations where the pay is so low that the next step down would be slavery, while here we're left mainly with low paying jobs in retail, fast food or in call centers (which continue to be outsourced overseas as I write this). They pay as little as possible for these jobs, while they ratchet up the cost of rent, the cost of fuel, the cost of clothing, of home necessities, of pretty much everything, while saying that a higher wage will cut into their business - these arguments coming from guys who make untold billions each year by hawking cheaply made and unsafe products from third world nations where their entire work force is often forced to work 2 or 3 days at a time, and for some up to 20 hours per day on only a few cents an hour.
Whenever someone does point this out? The usual voices in our media pipe up about how this is "socialism"...about how people just need to work harder or get a better job, knowing full well that these "better jobs" are almost non-existent...the discussion then turns towards how these "libtards" as some call people of my political orientation are somehow just too lazy to work and want everything for free...words that come from equally poor individuals who, against all belief, still vote Republican.
Not that the Democrats are any better, either - token words and phrases are thrown about regarding economic inequality and the state of the American job market, and then they tend to go right back to the drawing board as they try to get us involved with similar economic "partnerships" such as NAFTA. NAFTA, which only benefits corporations seeking to get richer in exchange for cheap labor and cheaper products. The latest incarnation of this? TPP - Trans Pacific Partnership. And outside of a few lone voices in Congress, TPP almost seems destined to pass no matter what the facts are. And again, only one candidate out of all the many running for office right now is saying anything about how further damaging TPP would be to an already precarious job market.
Sadly, I don't see Bernie Sanders winning office, despite how dead-on his message is with respect to the state of the country. I don't see him lasting past the primaries early next year. Even though his campaign stops are drawing tens of thousands, Clinton may very well end up being the front runner for the Democratic Party (the irony being that Sanders is only running on the Democratic ticket simply because as an independent he would not go far). As for the Republican side? I admit that while it is too early to tell, we may very well end up with Jeb Bush running on the Republican ticket, or in a worse case scenario, Ted Cruz. With choices like these, it is hard to maintain any serious faith in our electoral system. It really is. We're increasingly left with corporate shills for candidates. That fact alone doesn't bode well for what is supposed to be a democracy, as it is becoming more and more clear that those with millions, or even billions, are the ones dictating the future of the country. Those regular voters who do seem to count? All in areas that have been gerrymandered to the point where the idea of having anyone but a Republican representing those areas is nothing more than a pipe dream. All from voters who cast their ballot based off of religious ideals (the threat of a Christian theocracy alone seems to be all too real in this country), sound-bite slogans, attractiveness or who the particular voter would most like to have a beer with. In short, we're left with a bunch of corporate shills each time. Shills for president, and nothing else.
Take a look around your community at this moment in time. How does it look? Are you in a wealthy area? Then you have no real worries, I suppose. But for the bulk of Americans, what is the new norm out there? Roads that are in bad need of repair. Bridges that are almost in danger of falling apart. Schools that have a very limited budget compared to what they had decades ago, with the major end result being that most graduates of our school system are woefully unprepared where the sciences, literacy, mathematics and even basic knowledge of civics are concerned. A healthcare system that, for better or for worse, continues to lag far behind those of much of western Europe. A job market that increasingly is becoming more and more loaded with part time, minimum wage jobs in the service sector. An environment in a rather rough shape. Entire cities filled with abandoned homes and businesses (Detroit comes to mind here). All across the board, things do not look good, and in turn we look to those running for office for answers. Sadly, almost no one gets it.
Jeb Bush's solution to our economic woes is to "work harder". Work harder...advice that is being given to millions out there who are already working three, four jobs just to earn a living as the wage stagnates and the cost of living continues to skyrocket to unfathomable levels not seen in nearly a century. Donald Trump's ideas so far have consisted of erecting a wall along the entire southern border of the United States, and attacking John McCain as not being a "hero" for getting captured in Vietnam. Ted Cruz and Scott Walker seem to be focused on cutting everything in sight: food assistance programs meant to help the working poor keep food on the table, social security benefits for the elderly and the disabled, welfare programs aimed at helping small families be able to at least keep up with some bills while they search for work (and purchasing basic necessities for the house)...both of them seem to place the blame on immigrants, socialists and everyone else they can think of. Walker, for his part, we already know hates unions: just a few years ago, he barely made it through what could be described as a very tainted recall election, having attacked teacher's unions in Wisconsin and winning. As for Ben Carson? No real ideas to contribute, other than the fact that he apparently thinks being in prison makes you gay. And Santorum? I think little else needs to be said there.
On the opposite side, none of the people aside from Sanders seem to get that the main problems with our country lie solely with Wall Street. Clinton has addressed it to a degree, but again, all but one of the individuals running on the Democratic ticket for 2016 come across as corporate shills. It's almost like a choice between the lesser of two evils: the Republicans, who make it clear that their loyalties lie with multi-billion dollar corporations on Wall Street and elsewhere, and the Democrats, who at least try to hide it. Take as an example "Obamacare", or better known as the PPACA (Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act). The conservative right has been spitting venom for almost 6 years now on this monster of a law, blaming the President for forcing Americans to buy insurance that they feel they don't need. The political left (where I hail from) defends this law as the best thing to ever happen in our healthcare system. The reality, though, is that the PPACA doesn't exactly benefit us as taxpayers, even though millions of poor out there are actually able to get at least Medicaid because of the PPACA for quite possibly the first time, or at a minimum at least get credits that can be put towards health insurance plans. The PPACA, originally intended to be an act that would have created a single payer, universal health care system in this country, was hijacked by the health insurance industry. The same industry who in turn pressured both political parties in Congress to rewrite it so that no matter what, they would end up with even more customers in their respective systems. And more customers as we all know equals what, exactly? More money.
From there, it gets worse. Aside from a few people in Congress, almost everyone in both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party voted wholesale for the 2008 bailouts of some of Wall Street's biggest banks, and all at our expense as taxpayers. We weren't even given a choice, as the justification was that if we let banks that are too big to fail go under, then the rest of the economy will crash with them. Never mind the fact that someone could have introduced a law, or at least tried to, that would have broke up these banks just for that specific purpose. Same goes for voting for the Patriot Act, likely the greatest threat to the Bill of Rights in the entire history of the United States - a majority within both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party consciously continue to renew the Patriot Act at every turn, oftentimes granting more power to the NSA to spy on US citizens without so much as probable cause. It is true that this has been going on for decades now, but not at the obscene levels we are seeing today. And as for higher education? The record number of students in extreme debt from pursuing an education is simply unsustainable, and the fact that we have not followed the leads of our so-called European partners with respect to publicly funded, tuition free colleges and universities is simply mind boggling. And only two, perhaps three members of our own Congress have even tried to put a stop to this.
On care for veterans alone, the record there is very abysmal, and it has been throughout every presidential administration dating back to Ronald Reagan. Poorly maintained and unsafe medical facilities for veterans and active duty personnel...numerous cuts made to military personnel pay to such an extreme degree where it is not all that uncommon to see members of our own military selling their own blood plasma at for-profit "donation" centers throughout the nation...extreme and hurtful cuts done to veteran's benefits, veteran's assistance programs and care programs by, more often than not, Republicans (although the Democrats do share some guilt in this matter, by and large these cuts have been made by Republicans both in Congress and in the White House over the past few decades)...the list almost never seems to end, and yet somehow the money for fruitless military projects known to not work even by the very people proposing them is not a problem. Somehow, there's always money to wage another war that accomplishes nothing aside from obtaining new ways for private corporations to make more money. It is maddening that pitifully few members of our own Congress have even spoken up about these issues.
On another front, there's the matter of prison reform. In numerous states nationwide, the majority of offenders locked up are first time non-violent drug addicts. Again, there is little real discussion towards reforms there, as the cost to us taxpayers alone continues to skyrocket from housing these offenders for longer and longer terms. While the Democratic Party at least tries to have a discussion on the matter, even if it always is trivial in nature and never accomplishes anything, increasingly it is becoming clearer with each passing year: most state correctional agencies are beginning to produce goods for sale on the general market, with the sole source of labor being these same inmates who are sentenced to decades behind bars for the imagined crime of addiction. Nothing real is being done to actually address the issues of drug use from a medical perspective, and to see that these people are being sent into a lifetime behind bars to serve an increasingly for-profit prison system is utter madness. And again, with the exception of perhaps one of the candidates for the office of President for next year, no one else is discussing this. Instead, the clown car that is the Republican Party is obsessing over the imagined evil of gay marriage, Iran (which, let's face it, is relatively toothless compared to what the United States militarily is capable of), abortion and tax breaks for the rich - as if we need more of that. And the Democratic candidates, as a rule, almost seem to be silent.
Now, in the interests of fairness and disclosure, I will readily admit that I personally am a supporter of Bernie Sanders. He, along with a few other like-minded individuals, has been saying the same thing for decades: that we are kowtowing way too much to what the private sector wants. We've already allowed them to control our elections through the ability to pour in unlimited funds into any candidate's campaign of their choosing (think Citizen's United - it turned our democracy into a joke). We allowed them to virtually dictate a war no one asked for with Iraq. We allowed them to strip away good paying American jobs in the manufacturing sector and the tech sector, the rationale being that it's cheaper (and somehow better) to relocate to nations where the pay is so low that the next step down would be slavery, while here we're left mainly with low paying jobs in retail, fast food or in call centers (which continue to be outsourced overseas as I write this). They pay as little as possible for these jobs, while they ratchet up the cost of rent, the cost of fuel, the cost of clothing, of home necessities, of pretty much everything, while saying that a higher wage will cut into their business - these arguments coming from guys who make untold billions each year by hawking cheaply made and unsafe products from third world nations where their entire work force is often forced to work 2 or 3 days at a time, and for some up to 20 hours per day on only a few cents an hour.
Whenever someone does point this out? The usual voices in our media pipe up about how this is "socialism"...about how people just need to work harder or get a better job, knowing full well that these "better jobs" are almost non-existent...the discussion then turns towards how these "libtards" as some call people of my political orientation are somehow just too lazy to work and want everything for free...words that come from equally poor individuals who, against all belief, still vote Republican.
Not that the Democrats are any better, either - token words and phrases are thrown about regarding economic inequality and the state of the American job market, and then they tend to go right back to the drawing board as they try to get us involved with similar economic "partnerships" such as NAFTA. NAFTA, which only benefits corporations seeking to get richer in exchange for cheap labor and cheaper products. The latest incarnation of this? TPP - Trans Pacific Partnership. And outside of a few lone voices in Congress, TPP almost seems destined to pass no matter what the facts are. And again, only one candidate out of all the many running for office right now is saying anything about how further damaging TPP would be to an already precarious job market.
Sadly, I don't see Bernie Sanders winning office, despite how dead-on his message is with respect to the state of the country. I don't see him lasting past the primaries early next year. Even though his campaign stops are drawing tens of thousands, Clinton may very well end up being the front runner for the Democratic Party (the irony being that Sanders is only running on the Democratic ticket simply because as an independent he would not go far). As for the Republican side? I admit that while it is too early to tell, we may very well end up with Jeb Bush running on the Republican ticket, or in a worse case scenario, Ted Cruz. With choices like these, it is hard to maintain any serious faith in our electoral system. It really is. We're increasingly left with corporate shills for candidates. That fact alone doesn't bode well for what is supposed to be a democracy, as it is becoming more and more clear that those with millions, or even billions, are the ones dictating the future of the country. Those regular voters who do seem to count? All in areas that have been gerrymandered to the point where the idea of having anyone but a Republican representing those areas is nothing more than a pipe dream. All from voters who cast their ballot based off of religious ideals (the threat of a Christian theocracy alone seems to be all too real in this country), sound-bite slogans, attractiveness or who the particular voter would most like to have a beer with. In short, we're left with a bunch of corporate shills each time. Shills for president, and nothing else.
Wednesday, July 15, 2015
Job Corps And Beyond - The Good, The Bad, The Ugly
In my previous post, I mentioned that I had once been a part of the Job Corps program. It has defined several aspects of my life over the past 8 years. First, I'll give a brief overview of the program for those of you who are not aware of it.
Job Corps is a program administered under the U.S. Department of Labor's auspices for individuals who are between the ages of 16 to 24. It's intent is to provide free vocational and academic training to individuals in that particular age bracket. It's main goal is to help disadvantaged youth gain a better footing in the nation. It was founded in 1964 by Sargent Shriver, one of the lead architects of Lyndon Johnson's "War On Poverty", and also the man behind the Peace Corps and the Head Start program. Job Corps as a program was modeled after the Depression era Civilian Conservation Corps, and today is found at 125 locations spread throughout all 50 states, one territory and within Washington, D.C. Throughout all of these years, it has been persistent on helping to alleviate the symptoms of poverty, while simultaneously striving to give the students who attend each one of those 125 locations a better shot at a successful future.
Now that you have the story, allow me to elaborate on how it is a part of my life, beginning from my first encounter with the program.
It was in late 2006 that I first heard of Job Corps. I had been back in Michigan for well over a year, having briefly tried my hand at serving in the United States Navy (which did not end well - trust me on that), and then bouncing around metro Detroit between a slew of temporary jobs. As noted before in my previous post, the job market in Michigan at that time was very, very poor, and was right in the middle of a very brutal transition to an economy predominantly overrun by low wage service industry jobs. It wasn't pretty, and I was getting pretty desperate.
It was on a late afternoon at the local Michigan works center in late fall of that year where I first heard of the Job Corps program. It caught my interest, but only briefly. I ran across one of their pamphlets, and looked up the program online while I was searching through the job database on their computers. The nearest admissions office was well over 70 miles away, right in the heart of downtown Detroit. At the time, I was staying in yet another shelter towards the center part of Port Huron, out of work yet again as my last temp assignment through the local Labor Ready office had recently ended. One of Job Corps' newer pilot programs for vocational training, security, caught my interest. I remembered what dad had done for the local security firm, and had previously expressed interest in employment, but had never gone anywhere. I spent a brief time debating if I should try to contact this admissions counselor, but seeing that I had no way to Detroit (this was a time before Port Huron offered bus service that connected to SMART down by 23 Mile Road), I had to write off the opportunity for the time being. For the remainder of my final winter spent living in Port Huron, I found myself working in a dead end seasonal job at Family Dollar, as I would go between four more places before ultimately leaving Port Huron behind for good, frustrated with the lack of opportunities I had available to me in the area, and the lack of affordable housing. I found myself stuck at yet another shelter outside of downtown Detroit in mid-April, and it would only be days later that I would have a chance encounter that changed everything for me.
Downtown Detroit, if you're not familiar with it, is a strange place. You have a clash of both the new and the old - in several places, old buildings being rehabilitated for future use, with a few newer structures dotting the landscape here and there. You couldn't go more than a block or two without running into a homeless person panhandling for extra money, and the trek between where the shelter was located at and where downtown Detroit stood was a test alone - you had two ways to get there. You could either go on foot through some extremely shady neighborhoods off of Martin Luther King, cross the pedestrian bridge near 14th, and then take the rest of the way to downtown on foot via Michigan Avenue, or you could simply walk all the way down Martin Luther King to either Cass Avenue or Woodward. In terms of safety, you risked being mugged or shot along either path, so it wasn't exactly a good choice either way. That was the reality of the neighborhood I was in, and to the west it was no better, either: everything stretching right out to Dearborn itself was gang territory, and even the wrong color of a shirt could get you into hot water, depending on which gang it was. A simple trek to the other nearby library, nearly a mile or so southwest of me, was equally dangerous - it was an area split by the Latin Kings and Surenos. Kind of nerve wracking, from what I remember.
Either way, here it was, late April, and yet again I was looking through the employment books for anything. I had a few interviews throughout the downtown area, but almost all of the jobs that were available were way out in the suburbs, and here I was, with no money to my name, right in the middle of the city, with not even a dollar to get on a bus. While on my way out of the Michigan Works First building, I noticed the same sign I had seen on that pamphlet months earlier - Job Corps. And the admissions office was right downstairs, in one of the subbasements there. I thought to myself that it couldn't hurt to stop by, so down in the elevator I went. Naturally, no one was in the office. I resolved to come back the next day.
Early morning comes, and I find myself waiting outside of that office in that subbasement. Around 8 AM, the recruiter comes in - a short, bespectacled man named Joe. After introducing myself, we go into his office where we begin to talk. I indicate to him that I already have a high school diploma, and I have had some working experience, but didn't have many options available to me. I told him that I felt frustrated by where I was at in my life, and that I was looking for a way to get some sort of training that would help me get forward in my life. He asked if I had considered college or the military. I explained that I had tried my luck with the military, but it did not end well for me, and that college for me at that time was out of the picture - at the time, I could not get anyone in my family to sign off on any FAFSA paperwork.
I could tell he had heard similar stories before. He told me of several kids he had helped get into the program who have since gone on to lead rather successful lives, and that he would do whatever was in his power to help me get forward. Over the next few weeks, our time was spent going through a few informational sessions on what to expect with being a Job Corps student, what kind of career options I could explore, what (if any) kind of academic training I could take advantage of, and what centers in the Michigan/Ohio/Illinois region I could attend. Throughout all of this, I still continued to search for other employment opportunities, but it didn't seem like it would happen. At one particular interview that still stands out to me even today, I went in, only to be told by the interviewer that I did not have the experience at all for what they were hiring for, and that I should just stick with daytime labor. I remember walking out of there, swearing to myself that I would prove that man wrong one day. As for the shelter, time began to be pressing. They had instituted a time limit in which you had to get out while searching for employment. I was growing agitated with the luck I was having, and in the end, my final selection for a Job Corps center would come in the form of a place in Grand Rapids, known as the Gerald R. Ford Job Corps Center. Within two days, the paperwork was finished, and by June 5th of 2007, I was on a bus bound for Grand Rapids, all of my remaining belongings packed into one small backpack and one medium sized blue duffel bag.
It felt exhilarating to be there at the end of that day. Here I was, no longer in a shelter, but faced with the chance to get some training for a good job, and faced with the opportunity to start making a life for myself. It took a little while to go through my initial on-center briefings, but by 7 PM that night, I was finally settling into my dorm room. I slept better that night then I had in months.
The next few days was a little tedious. Numerous briefings, presentations and speeches on what to expect with life at a Job Corps center, the issuing of our color coded badges (I started out on what they called "green card" status - anyone with a yellow, blue, white or green card could not go off campus unless escorted by a staff member or someone on Student Senate), and our daytime uniforms. Those uniforms I initially thought were the ugliest things I had ever seen - dark blue trousers, shirts, tennis shoes and your Job Corps ID worn on a lanyard displayed around your neck. As I found, it wouldn't be forever. Because I had a high school diploma, a virtual rarity among the student population there, I was put into a fast track program that had me skip directly to my service week and my shadowing week. Service week is exactly what it is - you spend an entire week either helping the custodial staff do cleanup around center, or you are helping out in the kitchen. I split my time between both, helping out with cleaning up trash left around the place and helping with cleaning kitchen utensils and equipment. My shadowing week was spent sitting for several days in on the security trade program in an outlying building, where it was initially taught by a man who was in the National Guard, and a second session that week in the office assistant program. Honestly, after sitting through a class where you are just typing out document after document, with nothing better to do, I found I didn't like the idea of a desk job, so security it was.
Right before I could begin my official training, summer break came without warning. It was already late June, and seeing as how I had nowhere else to go, I simply elected to stay on campus. I had made a few friends already, a group of kids from some more rural areas of Michigan. I had encountered some brief problems after being accused of racism - it was still a sore subject for me after my experiences in Port Huron, and it came about after someone stole a personal journal I had been keeping in my locker, where I had written in it that I felt as though I were surrounded by a bunch of wannabe gang members and animals. The place sometimes felt like that, given the several false fire alarms pulled by a few guys, the gang signs they would flash, and the way they would act like they were in prison or something. I had seen similar behavior from people living in the outskirts of Detroit and on the routes I took in the time leading up to my enrollment in Job Corps, so naturally that was my reaction. Either way, the summer break felt nice. Normally, curfew for us on campus was 9:30 at night, where we would head up to our dorm floor within the main building (this particular center was located in an old high school that President Gerald Ford had once attended years before - I thought that was cool along with the historical marker out front) for head count, a brief room inspection and then bed. Same went for the females in their dorms. Most weekends, you had to be back on center by no later than 11:30, with bed following up shortly. That summer break, though...I elected to help out with a few cleaning and painting projects being done on center, and for the few of us who stayed on center, we were allowed to stay out until as late as midnight, or even 1 on some instances, with most of the accessible areas for students open all night. We did a few trips that I remember, too: one to the Frederick Meijer Gardens on the outskirts of Grand Rapids, several to go see movies, one trip to the beach out by Holland, and on another a day trip to the Detroit Zoo.
The following Sunday, the 8th, is when everyone else came back, fresh from partying during their entire time away. I had rather come to enjoy the peace and quiet, and had even taken the time (since there were so few of us, even green card holders could leave campus with no questions asked) to start reading up on the materials I was going to have for the security trade program. In some ways, I guess I resented the others a little for coming back. I had even taken a liking to a nearby coffee shop, where I would go with a small group of people and spend hours at a time playing pool in the cool of the evening. Like all good things, it had to end, and come the 9th, it was back to a regular schedule. I found that due to the timing of the break and the timing when I had actually begun my service week, I would have several more days of helping around center before I could actually begin my vocational training. I was a little bit annoyed, but I went with it, and by late July, I was outpacing my fellow classmates in the security trade program, as the center searched for a new instructor to head up the program. They would find one, alright, in the form of one of the most unique men I have ever had the pleasure of meeting, and one of my first ever positive mentors in my life: Craig Marks.
Craig was like no other man I had ever met. A retired Marine of 8 years and several deployments, 7 children, a Buddhist, winner of numerous martial arts disciplines (he was a black belt in several fighting styles and an expert on different types of edged weapons), a holder of a Bachelor's Degree in Criminal Justice with his post-Marines career dealing exclusively with at-risk youth at a juvenile detention center in Ottawa County...he was very impressive, and would turn out to be one of the first people who helped me overcome a ferocious anger that had driven me for so long. He helped me redirect the pain of what I saw in my family towards something better. Admittedly, I was upset at first, as he reshaped the program to resemble something like a very lite version of basic training, and took several other students who had gone to a military academy elsewhere in Michigan, placing them in charge as student leaders. I admit that at first I resented that, but now, I can see why - I wasn't ready for the challenges of leadership. We started doing drill formations, incorporating actual investigative techniques into our curriculum, adopting a uniform that almost resembled a SWAT outfit (right down to the black ACU tops, tactical pants, white undershirts and even black combat boots). We would have PT sessions morning and day, often going on four mile runs, sometimes longer. I noticed my body began to react positively to all of this training, and I took pride in myself for the first time since I set out for Great Lakes. We would have actual police officers come in and do lectures, partner up with area businesses and organizations to do internships with in a security role, and expanded on our volunteer work, which ultimately culminated in working directly with the Toys For Tots Program and the Marines. There were even times when active duty soldiers in the area would be invited to help us refine our drilling techniques, and we would adopt berets and white gloves as part of our uniform. It felt good to be a part of something, and in a strange way, we within the program looked at our peers in the Job Corps program as dishonorable for their actions alone. The bonus is I even managed to obtain a driver's license, something that was never possible for all the years I had spent since high school. It was incredible, and I was proud. By the time late fall hit, I felt like a new man and I was ready to take on the world.
Even despite the gains made during my vocational training, there was some problems under the surface during my time at Job Corps. One of the biggest was the "no snitching" culture. For months, outside of the small group of people I hung out with, I had mostly kept my head down in my off hours. I would go up to one of the rec rooms in the old gymnasium to do some game time occasionally, jump in on the occasional rec trip off center (one such time consisted of a concert while another was going to Monday Night Raw at Van Andel Arena), or use a computer every once in a while to check on emails, but beyond those ventures, for the most part, having obtained red card status and ultimately gold card status, I was simply content with keeping my head down and reading numerous books obtained at the local library. Again, my main topics I preferred to read of by that point in my life was history and current events. Occasionally, I devoted my reading to fantasy - the Harry Potter books, sci-fi novels from authors such as Robert Heinlein and Kim Stanley Robinson. Many of the students I had earlier written of as being glorified thugs, naturally, didn't like anyone who was quiet and reserved, and had started rumors of students getting paid to snitch. Center staff would repeatedly say those were rumors, nothing more, and that no one even gets paid for it. I became a prime target, of course - I always had money, although it was only acquired by going around and collecting soda cans and bottles to be recycled in exchange for 10 cents per bottle or can. Given how often everyone simply threw these items away, I would accumulate several massive bags full of bottles and cans, take them to the nearby grocery store, and exchange them. Still, some took this as a sign that I was surely a paid snitch without any proof, and it led to extraordinary tensions between myself and several other students, one of which led to a fight one night that saw me placed on paid leave off campus (at the home of my mother for Thanksgiving), while the student who initiated the fight was expelled in the end. After a few months, these accusations died down, and I settled in, finally having convinced my mother to sign paperwork that would allow me to, for the first time, attend college. I was quickly brought into the ACT program (shorthand for Advanced College Training) and rotated to a room specifically set aside for students who worked towards an associate's degree while still living on center.
With that, even more freedoms came about as a result of my having entered college. Partially due to Craig Marks, and partially stemming from a ride-along conducted with an officer with a local police department that I had done during my time off, I selected criminal justice as my major. I was even more motivated to pursue that field, and a career in law enforcement, due in part to the recent news that Stuey was now in prison for life. My entire goal was to get people like him off of the streets, and serve as a positive example in the community by wearing the badge. I had managed to take Christmas break off to go home and visit first my mom (who I had been talking to again for well over a year and a half) and my grandmother, and came back early to center to rest before beginning my journey through college.
My first two semesters were great. I did try to take a math course during my first semester, but had difficulty in passing all of my tests and assignments - I had the help of a tutor, but even with that, I would go back to center at night and puzzle my way through my math homework. I could not comprehend any of what was before me, and often got a lot of questions wrong. Still, I managed to finish a class on American government, and even managed to complete Introduction to Criminal Justice. The fourth class I took was a basic English course, which I passed with flying colors. My knack for writing was further developed with the aid of the instructor, and I was happy with everything that had unfolded. I had even joined the Foreign Affairs Club on campus, and had participated in the Model Arab League that year, going out to Grand Valley State University where I learned more about the Middle East then I ever had. Through that alone, and exposure to a few Muslim students back at Job Corps, I found even more understanding and knowledge of their ways of life. Through my classes, I would begin to understand why many of the kids I saw back on center acted the way they did.
Spring break for me was brief. I managed to get enough money to spend Memorial Day weekend back in Detroit, and I came back refreshed and ready for my next batch of classes. Many of the guys in my small circle of friends back on center had left: one had been terminated for violating the rules, while others completed their training and returned to their hometowns. I picked up a few new friends, and of course we would hang out, going out for coffee (or the occasional beer - one of the perks of being legal drinking age in the ACT Program), or just walking along the riverwalk downtown. I had briefly had a relationship that year, but it didn't work out due to differences in my life and hers. I still continued with my studies, learning that summer of the intricacies of the juvenile justice system and even getting a chance to visit the Kent County Juvenile Detention Center, where even more epiphanies would unfold in relation to the students on center. Summer break that year consisted of a brief visit home to see my dad, followed by a return to center to continue on with my classes and a search for employment. I had already completed my vocational training the previous November, and was ready to eventually move out into the world. It didn't pan out that way.
By early October, I was formally released from Job Corps, having managed to blow positive on a Breathalyzer test administered by a center security guard just 24 hours after a period of heavy drinking the previous night while on pass. The previous time, earlier in the summer, had occurred after returning from eating out with some classmates. The center's drug and alcohol counselor personally wrote to the disciplinary committee that I clearly had an addiction problem, and as a result I was terminated. The only saving grace I had is that I had managed to pick up a part time job working as a custodian, but it didn't last long. After two homes later, a permanent layoff as the recession finally hit Grand Rapids, and dropping out of college due to my compounding financial situation, I was living under a highway bridge by the summer of 2009, having finally landed there in March of that year. It took me until November of that year to finally leave Michigan behind for good, as even despite the success I had in Job Corps, no one was hiring. Michigan appeared to be sinking, and by the time I left, I had been back in the Detroit area since July of 2009, having stayed with two people briefly before being unceremoniously kicked out onto the streets in early November with no place to go, and no real income to speak of. I spent my final night in Michigan sleeping in an empty field near what used to be a former insane asylum, and come daylight, I was nowhere to be found - I had managed to get help with getting a ticket out of Michigan on Greyhound. The final two months of 2009 and first three months of 2010 I spent in North Carolina, initially landing in a shelter after my first plan failed, followed in order by cleaning the windows of local businesses for money while I found myself shuttling between two different places, with the window washing gig no longer working out at the end. By late March, I was in Colorado.
From there, it was a brief stay at someone's place. I had taken the money left over from window washing and my tax return, and rented out a room on the eastern side of Colorado Springs. For months on end, I got nothing but static on my job search. I made the decision to enroll in college again, wanting to finish where I started, but because I was given no paperwork to take with me, I was sent packing at my original place, and would land in a nearby shelter for a month. I eventually ran across an old friend while out and about one day, and ended up staying at his place while I searched for both work and a home using whatever I would have leftover from financial aid (I had to double up on it - out of state tuition is very expensive). In the process, I managed to meet someone who is still in my life and still means the world to me while working on an assignment for one of my classes. In turn, I was introduced to several other friends of hers. We all bonded together like a family, and for several years I found myself involved with ghost hunting - almost all of which came to a crashing halt earlier this year, having seen our team lose countless members, good and bad, all while the main man at the helm ran around spouting things off one would expect to hear in a psychiatric ward, not in any other normal setting. I managed to make even more friends during my first fall here through working for a local haunted house, and although I am no longer there (thanks in part to disagreements with one of the main people there), I'm hoping to continue on with working in that field. And I've held a few good jobs - I managed to stay on for a few years with the computer labs at my college, while briefly doing an internship with the county sheriff's office, working for a call center (a center which left a very bitter taste in my mouth), being involved with a club that took me to places I had never been to before, and to a good extent rediscovered the simple joys in life. Something about life in the mountains does that to a man.
I sit here now, working to finish this piece up almost three hours after I started it. Although times seem tough to me right now, and I'm temporarily stuck doing a job I care less and less for (but ironically do enjoy the flexibility), I'm confident things will get better. They have in the past, and I have good people on my side for once to help me get through this. I'm glad for the experiences I had...I no longer simply look at someone who acts like a gangster as a simple thug. I think just listening to them in my free time away from my classes helped - I understand what led them to be who they are, do what they do now. I don't look on anyone for being gay, bi, trans or even lesbian to such a high degree as I did before - I guess sharing quarters with such people when I was at Job Corps helped me to open up my eyes to what kind of people they truly are: they're just like us, only they have different tastes in who they love. Race to me is simply a non-sequitur, although I do admit I can laugh at jokes that poke fun of people who are of a different race or sexual orientation. It helps to have a sense of humor, and a thick skin. I'm still unsure as to the question of whether a god exists or not: I look at the state of the world, with all of the hate, violence and greed and wonder how any just god could tolerate it, and wonder if since nothing is being done, is there even such a thing as a god? And if I seem to be a proponent for those who are poor, it's because I am. Having spent so much of the last 10 years walking among them as a fellow poor man, having seen what has caused their plight, having seen almost no action done to alleviate their suffering, having endured the same pain they have with living on the streets, I am confident enough to say that I share a kinship with those who are poor...more in common than I ever will have with a wealthy man or even a wealthy woman. Simply put, where before I entered Job Corps blinded by rage, pain and anguish, now? I'm not the same person I used to be. And I'm perfectly okay with that.
Job Corps is a program administered under the U.S. Department of Labor's auspices for individuals who are between the ages of 16 to 24. It's intent is to provide free vocational and academic training to individuals in that particular age bracket. It's main goal is to help disadvantaged youth gain a better footing in the nation. It was founded in 1964 by Sargent Shriver, one of the lead architects of Lyndon Johnson's "War On Poverty", and also the man behind the Peace Corps and the Head Start program. Job Corps as a program was modeled after the Depression era Civilian Conservation Corps, and today is found at 125 locations spread throughout all 50 states, one territory and within Washington, D.C. Throughout all of these years, it has been persistent on helping to alleviate the symptoms of poverty, while simultaneously striving to give the students who attend each one of those 125 locations a better shot at a successful future.
Now that you have the story, allow me to elaborate on how it is a part of my life, beginning from my first encounter with the program.
It was in late 2006 that I first heard of Job Corps. I had been back in Michigan for well over a year, having briefly tried my hand at serving in the United States Navy (which did not end well - trust me on that), and then bouncing around metro Detroit between a slew of temporary jobs. As noted before in my previous post, the job market in Michigan at that time was very, very poor, and was right in the middle of a very brutal transition to an economy predominantly overrun by low wage service industry jobs. It wasn't pretty, and I was getting pretty desperate.
It was on a late afternoon at the local Michigan works center in late fall of that year where I first heard of the Job Corps program. It caught my interest, but only briefly. I ran across one of their pamphlets, and looked up the program online while I was searching through the job database on their computers. The nearest admissions office was well over 70 miles away, right in the heart of downtown Detroit. At the time, I was staying in yet another shelter towards the center part of Port Huron, out of work yet again as my last temp assignment through the local Labor Ready office had recently ended. One of Job Corps' newer pilot programs for vocational training, security, caught my interest. I remembered what dad had done for the local security firm, and had previously expressed interest in employment, but had never gone anywhere. I spent a brief time debating if I should try to contact this admissions counselor, but seeing that I had no way to Detroit (this was a time before Port Huron offered bus service that connected to SMART down by 23 Mile Road), I had to write off the opportunity for the time being. For the remainder of my final winter spent living in Port Huron, I found myself working in a dead end seasonal job at Family Dollar, as I would go between four more places before ultimately leaving Port Huron behind for good, frustrated with the lack of opportunities I had available to me in the area, and the lack of affordable housing. I found myself stuck at yet another shelter outside of downtown Detroit in mid-April, and it would only be days later that I would have a chance encounter that changed everything for me.
Downtown Detroit, if you're not familiar with it, is a strange place. You have a clash of both the new and the old - in several places, old buildings being rehabilitated for future use, with a few newer structures dotting the landscape here and there. You couldn't go more than a block or two without running into a homeless person panhandling for extra money, and the trek between where the shelter was located at and where downtown Detroit stood was a test alone - you had two ways to get there. You could either go on foot through some extremely shady neighborhoods off of Martin Luther King, cross the pedestrian bridge near 14th, and then take the rest of the way to downtown on foot via Michigan Avenue, or you could simply walk all the way down Martin Luther King to either Cass Avenue or Woodward. In terms of safety, you risked being mugged or shot along either path, so it wasn't exactly a good choice either way. That was the reality of the neighborhood I was in, and to the west it was no better, either: everything stretching right out to Dearborn itself was gang territory, and even the wrong color of a shirt could get you into hot water, depending on which gang it was. A simple trek to the other nearby library, nearly a mile or so southwest of me, was equally dangerous - it was an area split by the Latin Kings and Surenos. Kind of nerve wracking, from what I remember.
Either way, here it was, late April, and yet again I was looking through the employment books for anything. I had a few interviews throughout the downtown area, but almost all of the jobs that were available were way out in the suburbs, and here I was, with no money to my name, right in the middle of the city, with not even a dollar to get on a bus. While on my way out of the Michigan Works First building, I noticed the same sign I had seen on that pamphlet months earlier - Job Corps. And the admissions office was right downstairs, in one of the subbasements there. I thought to myself that it couldn't hurt to stop by, so down in the elevator I went. Naturally, no one was in the office. I resolved to come back the next day.
Early morning comes, and I find myself waiting outside of that office in that subbasement. Around 8 AM, the recruiter comes in - a short, bespectacled man named Joe. After introducing myself, we go into his office where we begin to talk. I indicate to him that I already have a high school diploma, and I have had some working experience, but didn't have many options available to me. I told him that I felt frustrated by where I was at in my life, and that I was looking for a way to get some sort of training that would help me get forward in my life. He asked if I had considered college or the military. I explained that I had tried my luck with the military, but it did not end well for me, and that college for me at that time was out of the picture - at the time, I could not get anyone in my family to sign off on any FAFSA paperwork.
I could tell he had heard similar stories before. He told me of several kids he had helped get into the program who have since gone on to lead rather successful lives, and that he would do whatever was in his power to help me get forward. Over the next few weeks, our time was spent going through a few informational sessions on what to expect with being a Job Corps student, what kind of career options I could explore, what (if any) kind of academic training I could take advantage of, and what centers in the Michigan/Ohio/Illinois region I could attend. Throughout all of this, I still continued to search for other employment opportunities, but it didn't seem like it would happen. At one particular interview that still stands out to me even today, I went in, only to be told by the interviewer that I did not have the experience at all for what they were hiring for, and that I should just stick with daytime labor. I remember walking out of there, swearing to myself that I would prove that man wrong one day. As for the shelter, time began to be pressing. They had instituted a time limit in which you had to get out while searching for employment. I was growing agitated with the luck I was having, and in the end, my final selection for a Job Corps center would come in the form of a place in Grand Rapids, known as the Gerald R. Ford Job Corps Center. Within two days, the paperwork was finished, and by June 5th of 2007, I was on a bus bound for Grand Rapids, all of my remaining belongings packed into one small backpack and one medium sized blue duffel bag.
It felt exhilarating to be there at the end of that day. Here I was, no longer in a shelter, but faced with the chance to get some training for a good job, and faced with the opportunity to start making a life for myself. It took a little while to go through my initial on-center briefings, but by 7 PM that night, I was finally settling into my dorm room. I slept better that night then I had in months.
The next few days was a little tedious. Numerous briefings, presentations and speeches on what to expect with life at a Job Corps center, the issuing of our color coded badges (I started out on what they called "green card" status - anyone with a yellow, blue, white or green card could not go off campus unless escorted by a staff member or someone on Student Senate), and our daytime uniforms. Those uniforms I initially thought were the ugliest things I had ever seen - dark blue trousers, shirts, tennis shoes and your Job Corps ID worn on a lanyard displayed around your neck. As I found, it wouldn't be forever. Because I had a high school diploma, a virtual rarity among the student population there, I was put into a fast track program that had me skip directly to my service week and my shadowing week. Service week is exactly what it is - you spend an entire week either helping the custodial staff do cleanup around center, or you are helping out in the kitchen. I split my time between both, helping out with cleaning up trash left around the place and helping with cleaning kitchen utensils and equipment. My shadowing week was spent sitting for several days in on the security trade program in an outlying building, where it was initially taught by a man who was in the National Guard, and a second session that week in the office assistant program. Honestly, after sitting through a class where you are just typing out document after document, with nothing better to do, I found I didn't like the idea of a desk job, so security it was.
Right before I could begin my official training, summer break came without warning. It was already late June, and seeing as how I had nowhere else to go, I simply elected to stay on campus. I had made a few friends already, a group of kids from some more rural areas of Michigan. I had encountered some brief problems after being accused of racism - it was still a sore subject for me after my experiences in Port Huron, and it came about after someone stole a personal journal I had been keeping in my locker, where I had written in it that I felt as though I were surrounded by a bunch of wannabe gang members and animals. The place sometimes felt like that, given the several false fire alarms pulled by a few guys, the gang signs they would flash, and the way they would act like they were in prison or something. I had seen similar behavior from people living in the outskirts of Detroit and on the routes I took in the time leading up to my enrollment in Job Corps, so naturally that was my reaction. Either way, the summer break felt nice. Normally, curfew for us on campus was 9:30 at night, where we would head up to our dorm floor within the main building (this particular center was located in an old high school that President Gerald Ford had once attended years before - I thought that was cool along with the historical marker out front) for head count, a brief room inspection and then bed. Same went for the females in their dorms. Most weekends, you had to be back on center by no later than 11:30, with bed following up shortly. That summer break, though...I elected to help out with a few cleaning and painting projects being done on center, and for the few of us who stayed on center, we were allowed to stay out until as late as midnight, or even 1 on some instances, with most of the accessible areas for students open all night. We did a few trips that I remember, too: one to the Frederick Meijer Gardens on the outskirts of Grand Rapids, several to go see movies, one trip to the beach out by Holland, and on another a day trip to the Detroit Zoo.
The following Sunday, the 8th, is when everyone else came back, fresh from partying during their entire time away. I had rather come to enjoy the peace and quiet, and had even taken the time (since there were so few of us, even green card holders could leave campus with no questions asked) to start reading up on the materials I was going to have for the security trade program. In some ways, I guess I resented the others a little for coming back. I had even taken a liking to a nearby coffee shop, where I would go with a small group of people and spend hours at a time playing pool in the cool of the evening. Like all good things, it had to end, and come the 9th, it was back to a regular schedule. I found that due to the timing of the break and the timing when I had actually begun my service week, I would have several more days of helping around center before I could actually begin my vocational training. I was a little bit annoyed, but I went with it, and by late July, I was outpacing my fellow classmates in the security trade program, as the center searched for a new instructor to head up the program. They would find one, alright, in the form of one of the most unique men I have ever had the pleasure of meeting, and one of my first ever positive mentors in my life: Craig Marks.
Craig was like no other man I had ever met. A retired Marine of 8 years and several deployments, 7 children, a Buddhist, winner of numerous martial arts disciplines (he was a black belt in several fighting styles and an expert on different types of edged weapons), a holder of a Bachelor's Degree in Criminal Justice with his post-Marines career dealing exclusively with at-risk youth at a juvenile detention center in Ottawa County...he was very impressive, and would turn out to be one of the first people who helped me overcome a ferocious anger that had driven me for so long. He helped me redirect the pain of what I saw in my family towards something better. Admittedly, I was upset at first, as he reshaped the program to resemble something like a very lite version of basic training, and took several other students who had gone to a military academy elsewhere in Michigan, placing them in charge as student leaders. I admit that at first I resented that, but now, I can see why - I wasn't ready for the challenges of leadership. We started doing drill formations, incorporating actual investigative techniques into our curriculum, adopting a uniform that almost resembled a SWAT outfit (right down to the black ACU tops, tactical pants, white undershirts and even black combat boots). We would have PT sessions morning and day, often going on four mile runs, sometimes longer. I noticed my body began to react positively to all of this training, and I took pride in myself for the first time since I set out for Great Lakes. We would have actual police officers come in and do lectures, partner up with area businesses and organizations to do internships with in a security role, and expanded on our volunteer work, which ultimately culminated in working directly with the Toys For Tots Program and the Marines. There were even times when active duty soldiers in the area would be invited to help us refine our drilling techniques, and we would adopt berets and white gloves as part of our uniform. It felt good to be a part of something, and in a strange way, we within the program looked at our peers in the Job Corps program as dishonorable for their actions alone. The bonus is I even managed to obtain a driver's license, something that was never possible for all the years I had spent since high school. It was incredible, and I was proud. By the time late fall hit, I felt like a new man and I was ready to take on the world.
Even despite the gains made during my vocational training, there was some problems under the surface during my time at Job Corps. One of the biggest was the "no snitching" culture. For months, outside of the small group of people I hung out with, I had mostly kept my head down in my off hours. I would go up to one of the rec rooms in the old gymnasium to do some game time occasionally, jump in on the occasional rec trip off center (one such time consisted of a concert while another was going to Monday Night Raw at Van Andel Arena), or use a computer every once in a while to check on emails, but beyond those ventures, for the most part, having obtained red card status and ultimately gold card status, I was simply content with keeping my head down and reading numerous books obtained at the local library. Again, my main topics I preferred to read of by that point in my life was history and current events. Occasionally, I devoted my reading to fantasy - the Harry Potter books, sci-fi novels from authors such as Robert Heinlein and Kim Stanley Robinson. Many of the students I had earlier written of as being glorified thugs, naturally, didn't like anyone who was quiet and reserved, and had started rumors of students getting paid to snitch. Center staff would repeatedly say those were rumors, nothing more, and that no one even gets paid for it. I became a prime target, of course - I always had money, although it was only acquired by going around and collecting soda cans and bottles to be recycled in exchange for 10 cents per bottle or can. Given how often everyone simply threw these items away, I would accumulate several massive bags full of bottles and cans, take them to the nearby grocery store, and exchange them. Still, some took this as a sign that I was surely a paid snitch without any proof, and it led to extraordinary tensions between myself and several other students, one of which led to a fight one night that saw me placed on paid leave off campus (at the home of my mother for Thanksgiving), while the student who initiated the fight was expelled in the end. After a few months, these accusations died down, and I settled in, finally having convinced my mother to sign paperwork that would allow me to, for the first time, attend college. I was quickly brought into the ACT program (shorthand for Advanced College Training) and rotated to a room specifically set aside for students who worked towards an associate's degree while still living on center.
With that, even more freedoms came about as a result of my having entered college. Partially due to Craig Marks, and partially stemming from a ride-along conducted with an officer with a local police department that I had done during my time off, I selected criminal justice as my major. I was even more motivated to pursue that field, and a career in law enforcement, due in part to the recent news that Stuey was now in prison for life. My entire goal was to get people like him off of the streets, and serve as a positive example in the community by wearing the badge. I had managed to take Christmas break off to go home and visit first my mom (who I had been talking to again for well over a year and a half) and my grandmother, and came back early to center to rest before beginning my journey through college.
My first two semesters were great. I did try to take a math course during my first semester, but had difficulty in passing all of my tests and assignments - I had the help of a tutor, but even with that, I would go back to center at night and puzzle my way through my math homework. I could not comprehend any of what was before me, and often got a lot of questions wrong. Still, I managed to finish a class on American government, and even managed to complete Introduction to Criminal Justice. The fourth class I took was a basic English course, which I passed with flying colors. My knack for writing was further developed with the aid of the instructor, and I was happy with everything that had unfolded. I had even joined the Foreign Affairs Club on campus, and had participated in the Model Arab League that year, going out to Grand Valley State University where I learned more about the Middle East then I ever had. Through that alone, and exposure to a few Muslim students back at Job Corps, I found even more understanding and knowledge of their ways of life. Through my classes, I would begin to understand why many of the kids I saw back on center acted the way they did.
Spring break for me was brief. I managed to get enough money to spend Memorial Day weekend back in Detroit, and I came back refreshed and ready for my next batch of classes. Many of the guys in my small circle of friends back on center had left: one had been terminated for violating the rules, while others completed their training and returned to their hometowns. I picked up a few new friends, and of course we would hang out, going out for coffee (or the occasional beer - one of the perks of being legal drinking age in the ACT Program), or just walking along the riverwalk downtown. I had briefly had a relationship that year, but it didn't work out due to differences in my life and hers. I still continued with my studies, learning that summer of the intricacies of the juvenile justice system and even getting a chance to visit the Kent County Juvenile Detention Center, where even more epiphanies would unfold in relation to the students on center. Summer break that year consisted of a brief visit home to see my dad, followed by a return to center to continue on with my classes and a search for employment. I had already completed my vocational training the previous November, and was ready to eventually move out into the world. It didn't pan out that way.
By early October, I was formally released from Job Corps, having managed to blow positive on a Breathalyzer test administered by a center security guard just 24 hours after a period of heavy drinking the previous night while on pass. The previous time, earlier in the summer, had occurred after returning from eating out with some classmates. The center's drug and alcohol counselor personally wrote to the disciplinary committee that I clearly had an addiction problem, and as a result I was terminated. The only saving grace I had is that I had managed to pick up a part time job working as a custodian, but it didn't last long. After two homes later, a permanent layoff as the recession finally hit Grand Rapids, and dropping out of college due to my compounding financial situation, I was living under a highway bridge by the summer of 2009, having finally landed there in March of that year. It took me until November of that year to finally leave Michigan behind for good, as even despite the success I had in Job Corps, no one was hiring. Michigan appeared to be sinking, and by the time I left, I had been back in the Detroit area since July of 2009, having stayed with two people briefly before being unceremoniously kicked out onto the streets in early November with no place to go, and no real income to speak of. I spent my final night in Michigan sleeping in an empty field near what used to be a former insane asylum, and come daylight, I was nowhere to be found - I had managed to get help with getting a ticket out of Michigan on Greyhound. The final two months of 2009 and first three months of 2010 I spent in North Carolina, initially landing in a shelter after my first plan failed, followed in order by cleaning the windows of local businesses for money while I found myself shuttling between two different places, with the window washing gig no longer working out at the end. By late March, I was in Colorado.
From there, it was a brief stay at someone's place. I had taken the money left over from window washing and my tax return, and rented out a room on the eastern side of Colorado Springs. For months on end, I got nothing but static on my job search. I made the decision to enroll in college again, wanting to finish where I started, but because I was given no paperwork to take with me, I was sent packing at my original place, and would land in a nearby shelter for a month. I eventually ran across an old friend while out and about one day, and ended up staying at his place while I searched for both work and a home using whatever I would have leftover from financial aid (I had to double up on it - out of state tuition is very expensive). In the process, I managed to meet someone who is still in my life and still means the world to me while working on an assignment for one of my classes. In turn, I was introduced to several other friends of hers. We all bonded together like a family, and for several years I found myself involved with ghost hunting - almost all of which came to a crashing halt earlier this year, having seen our team lose countless members, good and bad, all while the main man at the helm ran around spouting things off one would expect to hear in a psychiatric ward, not in any other normal setting. I managed to make even more friends during my first fall here through working for a local haunted house, and although I am no longer there (thanks in part to disagreements with one of the main people there), I'm hoping to continue on with working in that field. And I've held a few good jobs - I managed to stay on for a few years with the computer labs at my college, while briefly doing an internship with the county sheriff's office, working for a call center (a center which left a very bitter taste in my mouth), being involved with a club that took me to places I had never been to before, and to a good extent rediscovered the simple joys in life. Something about life in the mountains does that to a man.
I sit here now, working to finish this piece up almost three hours after I started it. Although times seem tough to me right now, and I'm temporarily stuck doing a job I care less and less for (but ironically do enjoy the flexibility), I'm confident things will get better. They have in the past, and I have good people on my side for once to help me get through this. I'm glad for the experiences I had...I no longer simply look at someone who acts like a gangster as a simple thug. I think just listening to them in my free time away from my classes helped - I understand what led them to be who they are, do what they do now. I don't look on anyone for being gay, bi, trans or even lesbian to such a high degree as I did before - I guess sharing quarters with such people when I was at Job Corps helped me to open up my eyes to what kind of people they truly are: they're just like us, only they have different tastes in who they love. Race to me is simply a non-sequitur, although I do admit I can laugh at jokes that poke fun of people who are of a different race or sexual orientation. It helps to have a sense of humor, and a thick skin. I'm still unsure as to the question of whether a god exists or not: I look at the state of the world, with all of the hate, violence and greed and wonder how any just god could tolerate it, and wonder if since nothing is being done, is there even such a thing as a god? And if I seem to be a proponent for those who are poor, it's because I am. Having spent so much of the last 10 years walking among them as a fellow poor man, having seen what has caused their plight, having seen almost no action done to alleviate their suffering, having endured the same pain they have with living on the streets, I am confident enough to say that I share a kinship with those who are poor...more in common than I ever will have with a wealthy man or even a wealthy woman. Simply put, where before I entered Job Corps blinded by rage, pain and anguish, now? I'm not the same person I used to be. And I'm perfectly okay with that.
Tuesday, July 14, 2015
An American Life
Foreword: After a long absence, I finally returned to my blog. I deleted all of my old posts after reading them yet again, and being utterly horrified at what I saw. Either way, I'm back, and I'm starting over from scratch with my blog here. I'm finding I have a ton of material to work with as far as my writing is concerned, and especially where political events are concerned. Here's to a new start.
In recent years, something has been wrong within America. Something deeply wrong. For those of you who are in your 20s and your 30s, or even older in some cases, I ask you to think back. Think back a decade...think back to two decades. Three, four or even five decades if you so choose to. What are your memories, your thoughts, your feelings like with respect to living in America before today? An immense sense of hope and pride? Dismay? What were they? Ask yourself that.
For myself, everything began with my birth well over 30 years ago. I don't remember a thing before the age of 3. That's a very common thing with most Americans. One of my first memories was sitting in a classroom within a basement of a former church. I remember feeling absolute terror as a man dressed as a clown was applying red makeup to my nose. That was my first memory, and it was in 1988. Yes, I was born during the Reagan years. Everything up to this point since that day has been an emotional rollercoaster for me, at least as far as my status as an American citizen goes.
I remember watching the fall of the Berlin Wall as a child. I didn't quite understand it at that time, but I knew something big was at work there. I remember seeing all hell break loose with the first Gulf War back in 1991. I remember those grainy images being broadcast from Baghdad, as tracer fire lit up the background, the target being unseen aircraft in the skies above. I remember seeing the bombings of Iraq on TV years ago from Allied forces, and the victorious feeling everyone had as the troops returned home from that brief conflict. I remember that like it was yesterday: my small town, in the Upper Peninsula. Yellow ribbons gracing almost every other door, every tree, in the small town I lived in. American flags hung literally everywhere. I remember going to school every morning during that time, feeling my heart swell and my pride increase as I faithfully recited the Pledge of Allegiance every morning.
I remember watching the end of the Soviet Union in the long, hot summer of 1991, the images being broadcast worldwide of tanks driving through the streets of Moscow, of a very defiant Boris Yeltsin in front of the Russian White House. I remember watching Gorbachev announce his resignation from the Communist Party just months later on television, watching him announce that the Soviet Union had officially dissolved. I remember going to school, where the feeling was that we had won the good fight. We small children, acting on the playground as if we were soldiers victorious from battle, our swings serving as imaginary fighter jets.
I remember seeing Bill Clinton get sworn into office in early 1993. I remember those mock elections done on Election Day in Elementary School. Almost everyone cast their vote with the sitting President at the time, George H.W. Bush, just because it felt like something everyone did. We didn't think to question that practice. We were children, nothing more, and we didn't know anything better. Life felt great then...my father with his job as a truck driver, my mom at home with us boys. Life felt awesome back then, and each summer, I would find myself looking forward to that inevitable trip with my dad in his truck. Everything seemed to be going great for my little family: Dad's job as a truck driver was bringing in a lot of interesting stories and a lot of awesome things in our house, Mom seemingly content with a little work here and there, mixed in with college, and always a night where the table was never empty. We even had a few pets, too, something I don't remember many of my peers from school having: a beautiful dog, two very rambunctious hamsters and even some fish. I still remember the day we sold off our old Nintendo Entertainment System and ended up buying a Sega Genesis. To me, it really felt like we were living the American Dream, and it was great. It was a sign, to me, that the 90s, at least under Clinton, were a good time to be alive.
Sure, I moved around a lot as a kid. I remember moving at least 6 times between 1990 and 2000, but to me, I figured it was a part of life. I still remember when we moved to Capac way back in 1992, back when my brother was almost 3 years old. I didn't know it at the time, but it was done to have him closer to the doctors in Ann Arbor (he was a NICU baby when he was born). At school, I don't remember having many friends, but life to me seemed carefree and the financial times seemed to be good. I would read books incessantly, learning everything there was to know about history, medicine, government...anything I could get my hands on. I remember a month long period alone where I read nothing but the works of Tolkien, staying up way past what was supposed to be my bedtime pouring through the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, and then diving into The Hobbit and The Silmarillion.
I also remember the conflict in Kosovo back in the late 90s. I would see these horrific stories on the news each night of inhumane atrocities committed by a man named Slobodan Milosevic, and see a story follow all of these up of our men and women on the march in the Balkans, fighting to protect the many innocent people living over there. I remember being drawn in by the story of the capture and detention of one Staff Sergeant Christopher Stone. I would hear the stories of how this guy enlisted in the Army to fight for his country, how he wanted to help others less fortunate then he was. I would see the photos released by his captors, the bruises from regular beatings he suffered very evident on his face. For six long weeks, everyone throughout Michigan held their breath for this man. Here he was, a guy from Capac, a town I called home for almost five years, being held against his will by what seemed to be a vicious and brutal enemy. After his release from captivity, secured by none other than the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the entire town broke out into an unfettered celebration.
I remember being there the day he came home. WJBK (Fox 2) teamed up with WWJ, WJBK, Art Van and The Parade Company of Detroit to put on a welcome home parade for him. I remember being in awe of the massive crowds that day. Members of the international media seemed to be everywhere that day: Time, BBC, NBC, ABC, CBS, New York Times. It felt surreal to be there in this otherwise quiet, nondescript Midwestern town that most people wouldn't think about twice. I remember the Air Force jets from nearby Selfridge Air Force Base flying overhead in tribute to this man, who had lived an otherwise normal life until being captured in Kosovo. Jets, that paid tribute to a man who had returned home to a hero's welcome, a symbol of a very successful war conducted against a genocidal madmen in eastern Europe. It wouldn't be until years later that former soldiers who had served with him finally spoke out, speaking of how he had been in the wrong place, at the wrong time, doing things he should not have been doing...of how he had been charged with adultery behind closed doors, the catalyst being that he had gone into a dangerous area to call a German girlfriend of his. Needless to say, this man that I once viewed as a hero now has a sullied reputation as a result of these revelations, even after having retired with the rank of Major from the Michigan National Guard earlier this year.
The 90s ended on a high note for not only myself, but my family. We were living the dream in the thumb of Michigan. I was finally making friends at school, we seemed to be on track to owning a house and the best part of it all was dad finally had his own truck. The future seemed to be very promising, and I was even considering getting into football for the first time, something I had never even thought of at any point in my life beforehand. We were really living what some called the dream, and we had the home to prove it.
It was about 15 years ago this past May that it all started to come undone. By early May, we had lost the house, and dad had lost that beautiful Freightliner of his. There was talk of moving again, this time back to Port Huron. I was crushed - the dreams I had of one day being a football star, the friends I would lose. I didn't take well to any of it, and by early May, we were back in Port Huron yet again. I missed my friends. I missed that beautiful three bedroom home we had. I missed being close to the lakeshore, but far from civilization as I knew it at that time. I would get the chance to do one final trip at my old school, going up to Mackinac Island for an entire weekend. It was part of a school trip that had been pieced together one final time, and I soaked in as much as I could of it. By the time it ended, I was back in Port Huron, without a single clue as to what I would do. I had been given an early summer break by the school district I was transferring into, the justification being that it was too late in the year to really do anything as far as academics were concerned. I fell into a slump - separated from everyone I knew back in Deckerville, and feeling isolated and at odds with the environment in which I lived. Then, on one day towards the end of my first month back in Port Huron, fate would meet me head on.
I had been wanting to meet new people for a few weeks. It had been quite some time since my last contact with old friends of mine from up towards Deckerville, and I was wandering up and down my street one hot afternoon when I met three interesting kids: Dustin, Justin and Brad. They invited me to hang out while they were shooting hoops. I had no problems with this, and immediately what I would remember as the best summer of my life for a little bit took off. Every day, we all seemed to be hanging out with one another. We would go down by the river to these old docks, where the guys would jump in to swim, while I would look on with amusement, yet too terrified of drowning to jump in. The nights seemed to blend in with the days, and in mid-summer, an old friend from up in Deckerville came to spend a few nights. We would constantly be hanging around one another, laughing, joking, wrestling...doing mainly whatever it is that American teenagers do. At select nights, I would find myself riding around with Justin and his brother Craig, all of us just endlessly cruising around the city with no objective, no real reason other than to just get out. Other nights would be spent on their front porch, talking all the way until daybreak at times. It helped lift me out of a depression I was falling into, and I welcomed it.
But that is not the fate I write of. That fate came in the form of a young man named Stuey. I vaguely remembered meeting him when I had first lived in Port Huron. This was during the summer of 97, and I vaguely remembered him being a bit of a jerk, roughing me up for no evident reason. It was during that weekend when my old friend from Deckerville visited that Stuey would fully come into the picture, complete with an attitude not unlike that of a few certain people I would encounter later at Job Corps. There would be a times I went with Stuey and a few other people: one night, we spray painted the side of someone's garage, a person who had managed to incur Stuey's wrath for being a "snitch" - I had never heard the term before that night, and I just went along with it, not realizing what was really going on with him. I followed him and these other guys as they went to an alley behind another house, growing increasingly uncomfortable with what I was getting myself into, and watched with muted shock and slight horror as they threw a brick through the car window of another person that had incurred Stuey's wrath. It was pretty evident from that moment that he was not a good person to be around, and I tried to make efforts to distance myself from him. The idea of being locked away in juvenile detention because of this guy, quite frankly, was not something I wanted to happen, let alone be a part of. His girlfriend's parents, who lived a few houses down from me, saw what kind of trouble he was, and made attempts to bar her from seeing him. It didn't work, evidently, as the last I had heard, she had a few kids with him. In time, I would become more and more outspoken against him, seeing him as a clear and direct threat to not only my safety, but that of others in the neighborhood. This as I continued to hang out with Dustin, who was slowly but surely becoming like his mother...strung out on drugs and bound for a life in and out of jail. I would suffer two beatings from Stuey in the end, which ended both times with him threatening to kill me initially at knife point and at gun point the second time for "talking shit" about him.
Ultimately, he ended up serving a brief prison sentence for his involvement in a drive-by shooting a few blocks away. It was rather thrilling to know that he was gone, and I admit today that I didn't exactly mourn his absence. The guy had been enough of a problem for me to begin with. He had managed to leave behind a 40 oz bottle of beer one night when both of my parents were gone, hiding it behind our couch in the living room (it was found a month or two later by my dad while doing house cleaning), as well as the two times he jumped me, along with quite possibly being the person responsible for throwing a brick through our front window. Naturally, he was able to secure an early release, and the last time I actually saw him, he was bragging to a mutual friend about how awesome prison was. In the end, it seems he got his wish, as he is now serving out for the following crimes: conspiracy to commit homicide, first degree homicide, kidnapping and accessory to the fact after a felony. I wonder at times if the last 10 or so years he has spent behind bars has shed any light for him on what kind of a person he is, and I often doubt any of that time has done much good for him. Even after all of these years, I still think of him and cannot help but associate anything other than the world "evil" with him. Small wonder I want to go into law enforcement one day after dealing with a person like him.
Outside of that, my worldview was strange for my first initial year or two in Port Huron. I had never been in a city of that size before, and had never been exposed to different cultures before. I still remember my gut reaction to the events of September 11th - how we needed to bomb the ever living daylights out of the Middle East, all the way back to the Stone Age if need be. I briefly found myself adopting racist views because of the influence of a few former peers, too - I still bear the shame of that to this day. In the end, it took befriending a few Arab Americans in the area and a few African Americans I lived nearby to change my entire view on matters of race. For a time, too, I wasn't even a fan, let alone a supporter, of people who were gay, lesbian, bi or transgender. I didn't see them as fellow human beings at the time. All I knew were the people I was surrounded by at the time, a number of whom were toxic in mind and in belief.
It was by early 2003 that my entire outlook began to change. I remember the drum beats to war in the Middle East building up louder and louder. I remember President George W. Bush, whose method of winning the 2000 election I had disagreed with, making a case without any proof, or even evidence, to go to war against Iraq for the second time. By that time, I had shaken off the reins of prejudice for good, having had even my own doubts about that mentality for the previous three years I was in Port Huron, electing to not talk to many people in my personal life who had come to be outright racists, sexists, outright homophobes even. I was slowly but surely making friends with people at school, and briefly had a love interest that through my own recklessness and willingness to listen to those previous people in my life had scorned in the most painful way possible. I was starting to wake up to the world around me, and it wasn't pretty.
I remember seeing the live video feed of bombs being dropped over Baghdad yet again. I remember seeing the tens of thousands of soldiers, Marines, sailors and airmen marching across the border from seemingly every direction. I remember asking myself what the point of all this was. I remember the scenes of carnage and destruction, of entire families blown to bits by wanton disregard for who the target was. It horrified me. I had already been striving to learn about different cultures for months, and especially those of people in the Middle East. I had learned of the hardships they had under brutal, bloodthirsty dictators, the core messages behind their respective religions (both the good strains and the bad strains), and I watched with mounting horror and confusion as it was insinuated that Saddam Hussein and Iraq somehow were involved with September 11th. I asked out loud...why are we not going after the people in Afghanistan, Bin Laden and his terror network, instead? I began to read up on the backgrounds of every member involved with George W. Bush's administration - all were connected to major oil corporations. I read up on exactly what Iraq had for natural resources - oil, and a lot of it - the catch was that much of it was embargoed by the U.N. since the days of the First Gulf War, when Iraq had broken international law by invading and occupying Kuwait. And the people who wanted access to that immense amount of oil for their own financial gains but couldn't because of those embargoes? The very same oil companies that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condeleeza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld were all associated with. The very same oil companies that, for over a decade, had publicly expressed the fact that they were pissed they could not have access to those oil fields for themselves. Everything fell into place all at one seemingly key moment, and I found myself horrified. Here I was, a year out from graduating high school, ready to step out into the world and start working towards a financially independent, successful and productive future, one in which I could retire, if not with a decent pension, then with Social Security, and yet our own President was reaching deep into that money and blowing it on a war to gain more oil for private companies? It spurred my interest in political and current events.
At home, dad had been away from truck driving for the better part of three years, the result of a bad accident in Ohio. He no longer could drive, and him and my mom had divorced in the time since. Mom, from what little I knew, was living in her car somewhere down in Detroit. Dad's immense anger towards her affected me to the point where even saying hi to her felt awkward. In many ways, I feel as if we, being myself and my brother, were brainwashed to hate her for the simple act of leaving. Hindsight, though, tells a different story: today, I can see that it was a marriage not meant to last at all, what with the lack of communication and very different mindsets. By all accounts, my mom was very much a party girl when my dad met her in the early 80s. My dad had been raised the opposite way by my grandfather: work hard before playtime. Coupling that with his brief time spent in the Army, and just the difference in personalities is very, very visible. I just never paid that much attention as a kid. Work was hard to come by in that entire 3 year period. Dad had managed to find a job working graveyards for a local security company, but there wasn't much else to be found. The mighty Big Three of the automotive industry were shutting down plants left and right, leaving not only thousands of workers from their plants left without any work, but also leaving hundreds more in supporting industries out of work because of the lessened amount of spending power in existence: retail, food service, health care, sanitation, construction, law enforcement, fire services, security...everybody hurt from each plant closing, and in response, seemingly every local college, ranging from SC4, to Baker, to even the University of Michigan down in Ann Arbor, swelled with new students. They even built a tech training building on the campus of SC4 because of the sudden influx of people who were suddenly out of work with no other real skills other than what they had from a lifetime spent in the plant.
Within the social services field, I watched as the number of people applying for disability out of sheer desperation to obtain any source of income in a suddenly destroyed economy mushroom, right in conjunction with the number of people on welfare. I would watch with growing horror as the Republicans in charge of the state responded with measures that were callous and almost inhumane: proposing obscene laws to conduct drug tests on the newly poor who were just trying to get a helping hand until things improved, stating in news interviews that it was everyone's fault for losing their job because of the unions, passing laws that dictated where those formerly employed factory workers (who were now homeless because of the crash in Michigan's economy) could and could not sleep, where they could use the restroom, where they could eat at...I watch as the Republican Party in Michigan reacted shrewdly and callously to a crisis that had been lurking ever since Nixon opened the doors to China in the early 70s. In Detroit, the news was exceedingly grim. I had never paid attention during the 90s to a great degree, but it seemed like every night, there were stories of people resorting to selling drugs to get by, engaging in prostitution...it was literally a parade of sorrow. There was a brief flash of hope when Kwame Kilpatrick was elected as mayor, but even he would fall in short order, having been the direct instigator of massive corruption unheard of in any other American city, and ultimately leave the city to file for bankruptcy, a consequence of Kilpatrick's terrible mismanagement, in conjunction with that of a hopelessly corrupt and ineffective City Council and a larger than life mayor in the form of Coleman A. Young. A later in-depth story conducted by the Detroit Free Press would ultimately show that decades of bad decisions, corruption and poorly handled government over numerous Democratic and Republican administrations in Detroit was the real cause of the bankruptcy, but Kilpatrick was the ultimate zenith and final nail in the coffin.
Even on simple trips to Detroit, I would come home depressed after seeing what I did. Block after block of dilapidated homes. Endless rows of now abandoned factories that had folded only months before, if not years before. Entire skyscrapers in and around the downtown area completely abandoned and left to the mercy of the elements. Countless homeless and poor, none of whom had a way to make a stable living anymore. The western suburbs, southern suburbs and northern suburbs were no better for me. Inkster, once known as the city where Motown was born at, now reduced to a city full of corrupt cops and hopelessly poor citizens. Westland, an equally crime ridden area with no real jobs aside from what one could find for a brief period of time...mostly flipping burgers or working for a temporary basis in retail. Wayne, a city that has suffered immensely from the loss of the old Ford plant there. In the northern sections of Wayne County, Roseville and Mt. Clemens, all rapidly turning into a giant rust belt as the former auto suppliers that served as the bloodlines of the Big Three shuttered and closed up while the plants they served relocated overseas, the result of greed driven CEOs who wanted to pay less in wages and less for materials to save more money for themselves. Romulus, Southgate, Trenton and several other cities would suffer equally as well. And our elected leaders in the state House would demonize the populations of each one of these cities as being at fault for not wanting to work, for just wanting free government handouts while playing the role of Cadillac Welfare Queens. I would see the denials that the decline of all of these cities was directly due to the destruction brought inadvertently by the closure of so many manufacturing plants, and I would grow furious.
In 2004, I would be finally old enough to vote, but it was an exercise in futility. The contestants for the office of President that year were John Kerry and George W. Bush for a second term. I initially saw hope with Howard Dean, but that hope would fade in the light of his supposed "meltdown" on the campaign trail. The conservative media was ruthless, and in the end, those of us who identified as liberal were left with a very watered down candidate in the form of John Kerry. Kerry, a man who once stood before Congress and blasted his own government for it's highly unethical and unnecessary war conducted in Vietnam, a man who once stood outside of Capitol Hill with thousands of other veterans to throw the medals he had onto the steps. Kerry, by 2004, was a corporate shill, having married into the Heinz family, themselves best known for mass producing condiments such as relish, mustard and ketchup. Desperate for some sort of change, no matter how moderate, I cast my vote for Kerry. In the end, I still watched on election night as Bush walked towards a virtual second term, having used 9/11 and terrorism throughout his entire campaign to almost scare Americans into voting for him. With his victory was a continued Republican dominance in Congress. By that point, the war in Iraq had been settled, into to turn into a disastrous occupation that was draining us monetarily. Through it, we also saw all hell break loose as a civil war broke out between two different factions in Iraq. On the international front, most of western Europe hated our guts, while what few allies we did have for Iraq were only there after having been seemingly bullied into doing so by President Bush. At home, the Republicans continue to pass laws allowing for our own state security agencies to spy on us without warrants. I watched with dismay as anti-union laws were passed in state after state. I watched with extreme dismay as bills were passed that allowed for our tax dollars to be used to prop up banks that were in danger of going under due to their own reckless stupidity and arrogant disregard for consumer protection laws, while still more laws were passed that allowed American companies to relocate the bulk of their operations in nations where slavery was all but legal. I watched, pained, as the ability for Americans stuck in dire financial straits was stripped away as Republicans made it easy for creditors to pursue debtors using whatever means necessary, even to the point where a debtor landed on the streets, unable to stay afloat financially but still forced under the law to continue paying that debt as they went from shelter to shelter, bridge to bridge, with no way out. I watched as Republicans made the ability to declare bankruptcy as a last resort nearly impossible. And it tripled my anger.
I questioned if this was the same country that had done so much good in the past for it's middle class and it's poor. I had read before of FDR's seemingly titanic efforts to uphold the poor into a better position in life. I had read of Johnson's seemingly endless war waged to end poverty, of Teddy Roosevelt's fight to improve working conditions, food and drugs at the very turn of the 20th century. I watched with even greater horror during 2007, as the Democratic Party immediately seized control of Congress, but then proceeded to bail out banks whose irresponsible, almost illegal predatory practices had landed millions of unsuspecting homeowners onto the streets, and then watched with horror yet again as the remainder of the economy across the nation crashed, plunging even more millions into inescapable poverty, while the architects of the disaster on Wall Street were propped up by our own government, to the extent where they were given billions that then ended up being doled out as bonuses to CEOs who should have been in prison for the rest of their lives, not allowed to walk free and continue to eat caviar and play golf.
That was the first real stirrings of discontent I had with banks. I haven't trust them in the years since, but the sad reality is that we live in a system today where you cannot get by without a bank account. It's virtually the law of the land. I did have hope back in 2008 with Barack Obama. I really did. I remember thinking to myself that it was awesome to see someone who finally gets it, that it was awesome to see someone who was actually going to make a difference. And now, as 2016 approaches, I wonder what the hell I was thinking.
In the time since 2008, I watched as the Democratic Party presented a new way forward with health coverage in this country. Most know it to be Obamacare, but I still continue to call it the Patient Affordable Care and Protection Act. It sounded like a masterpiece when it was first brought up: here, for the first time in our nation's history, was the promise of a universal health care system where you would not go broke just from seeing a doctor. All of 2009 passed, and early 2010 hit, before the entire bill itself was passed by Congress. By the time it was finished, I had found myself with diminished respect for our President and Congress. The health insurance industry took what could have been a great, amazing thing and twisted it out of proportion, sending their talking heads onto CNN, Fox News and anywhere else they could think of to essentially argue that this idea was tantamount to socialism, and that it wouldn't work here because they tried it in Europe and it has been a disaster, all facts aside and proof aside. In the end, as a result of the pressure put on Congress (and to a slight degree President Obama), we were left with a clusterfuck of a law where no matter what, you still have to purchase health insurance through a private company, although the upside is that at least they don't bar you based on pre-existing conditions anymore. If you're under a certain income level, your only two real options? Medicaid or Medicare, neither of which fully cover a person's medical, dental or vision needs. It was, in the end, a twisted, bloated version of something that originally had good intentions, but now only continues to stand to benefit the health insurance industry's profit margins. And we never got a say in the matter.
While the occupation of Iraq ended, we are still mired in an endless conflict in Afghanistan, even with limited numbers of military personnel over there. There have been efforts to make peace with the Taliban, to even allow them a seat at the table, but to no avail. It seems as if for that part of the world, it is better to leave it alone. The tribal differences alone cannot be solved with mere cash payments or empty promises of democracy that few actually adhere to. As far as international relations, while they have improved to a certain degree, we have a lot of damage to fix for decades of bad, cruel, inhumane and blatantly undemocratic actions committed by previous administrations. With regards to the job market, nobody is doing anything to fix it. If anything, given recent news, we are poised to end up in yet another foolish international trade agreement that is certain to see even more American jobs end up vanishing and reappearing in another country, courtesy of the Trans Pacific Partnership, which to my dismay the President is all for. There has been no real movement to eliminate student debt, either - it is rapidly approaching a breaking point, and the Republicans more than anyone continue to fight off efforts to simply forgive most student debt and make higher education cost-free in this country. To tell the truth, I don't see anyone in Congress or the White House even trying to make it happen, and at this stage, no matter what party ends up in the White House next, it's a given that it will be a corporate sellout in the form of someone like Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush. The problem of poverty has not been seriously addressed, either, as there are even more restrictions on social welfare programs such as the SNAP Program, Section 8 and Social Security that are now on the books, while off in the background the only real growth in the job market has been through part time, minimum wage work for fast food and retail that does not even begin to offset the cost of living. As for a better skilled, higher paying job? Employers as a trend appear to be looking more and more at hiring immigrants willing to work for less. Education, experience and training all appear to be nothing compared to the fact that someone will work for very little money in exchange for a job title. And in the interest of disclosure and fairness, I am one of those millions trapped in poverty with what seems to be no clear way out. The reality, for me, is that trickle down economics are very much what is being imposed on us as citizens.
The only other area that has seen any growth? The so-called "share" economy, or what others would call the "1099 economy". I fall directly into that category, having for an undetermined amount of time in the future to rely on driving as an independent contractor for Lyft, constantly worrying about what people think of me - a thing made very real because passengers rate you based on what they think of you and not how you conduct your job, and constantly worrying if whether or not I will even be able to pay a bill on time in light of the fare cuts the company made before Uber, a competitor, made them permanent by lowering their prices as well - all at the expense of drivers such as myself. Couple that with no advertising being done by the main company I drive for, Lyft, in my area, and extremely low rates with few passengers, and it is no wonder why our economy is in such a bad shape.
In many ways, politically, both parties are to blame for the mess we are in, along with irresponsible, reckless individuals within the business realm. Equally culpable are the voters who continue to vote in leaders in both parties who do nothing to help heal the entire nation...leaders who only get voted in based on their looks or their religious beliefs, or how likeable they could possibly be at a party, or even how down home they seem. Either way, that has been the gist of my life, and why I believe what I believe in, as a start. Coming in future posts will be further tidbits to expand upon my own backstory, as well as thoughts on current events and political matters.
My name is Chris, I'm a 30 year old poor guy who hopes to make a difference somehow, and this is my blog. Welcome, and I'm happy to have you all along for the ride.
In recent years, something has been wrong within America. Something deeply wrong. For those of you who are in your 20s and your 30s, or even older in some cases, I ask you to think back. Think back a decade...think back to two decades. Three, four or even five decades if you so choose to. What are your memories, your thoughts, your feelings like with respect to living in America before today? An immense sense of hope and pride? Dismay? What were they? Ask yourself that.
For myself, everything began with my birth well over 30 years ago. I don't remember a thing before the age of 3. That's a very common thing with most Americans. One of my first memories was sitting in a classroom within a basement of a former church. I remember feeling absolute terror as a man dressed as a clown was applying red makeup to my nose. That was my first memory, and it was in 1988. Yes, I was born during the Reagan years. Everything up to this point since that day has been an emotional rollercoaster for me, at least as far as my status as an American citizen goes.
I remember watching the fall of the Berlin Wall as a child. I didn't quite understand it at that time, but I knew something big was at work there. I remember seeing all hell break loose with the first Gulf War back in 1991. I remember those grainy images being broadcast from Baghdad, as tracer fire lit up the background, the target being unseen aircraft in the skies above. I remember seeing the bombings of Iraq on TV years ago from Allied forces, and the victorious feeling everyone had as the troops returned home from that brief conflict. I remember that like it was yesterday: my small town, in the Upper Peninsula. Yellow ribbons gracing almost every other door, every tree, in the small town I lived in. American flags hung literally everywhere. I remember going to school every morning during that time, feeling my heart swell and my pride increase as I faithfully recited the Pledge of Allegiance every morning.
I remember watching the end of the Soviet Union in the long, hot summer of 1991, the images being broadcast worldwide of tanks driving through the streets of Moscow, of a very defiant Boris Yeltsin in front of the Russian White House. I remember watching Gorbachev announce his resignation from the Communist Party just months later on television, watching him announce that the Soviet Union had officially dissolved. I remember going to school, where the feeling was that we had won the good fight. We small children, acting on the playground as if we were soldiers victorious from battle, our swings serving as imaginary fighter jets.
I remember seeing Bill Clinton get sworn into office in early 1993. I remember those mock elections done on Election Day in Elementary School. Almost everyone cast their vote with the sitting President at the time, George H.W. Bush, just because it felt like something everyone did. We didn't think to question that practice. We were children, nothing more, and we didn't know anything better. Life felt great then...my father with his job as a truck driver, my mom at home with us boys. Life felt awesome back then, and each summer, I would find myself looking forward to that inevitable trip with my dad in his truck. Everything seemed to be going great for my little family: Dad's job as a truck driver was bringing in a lot of interesting stories and a lot of awesome things in our house, Mom seemingly content with a little work here and there, mixed in with college, and always a night where the table was never empty. We even had a few pets, too, something I don't remember many of my peers from school having: a beautiful dog, two very rambunctious hamsters and even some fish. I still remember the day we sold off our old Nintendo Entertainment System and ended up buying a Sega Genesis. To me, it really felt like we were living the American Dream, and it was great. It was a sign, to me, that the 90s, at least under Clinton, were a good time to be alive.
Sure, I moved around a lot as a kid. I remember moving at least 6 times between 1990 and 2000, but to me, I figured it was a part of life. I still remember when we moved to Capac way back in 1992, back when my brother was almost 3 years old. I didn't know it at the time, but it was done to have him closer to the doctors in Ann Arbor (he was a NICU baby when he was born). At school, I don't remember having many friends, but life to me seemed carefree and the financial times seemed to be good. I would read books incessantly, learning everything there was to know about history, medicine, government...anything I could get my hands on. I remember a month long period alone where I read nothing but the works of Tolkien, staying up way past what was supposed to be my bedtime pouring through the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, and then diving into The Hobbit and The Silmarillion.
I also remember the conflict in Kosovo back in the late 90s. I would see these horrific stories on the news each night of inhumane atrocities committed by a man named Slobodan Milosevic, and see a story follow all of these up of our men and women on the march in the Balkans, fighting to protect the many innocent people living over there. I remember being drawn in by the story of the capture and detention of one Staff Sergeant Christopher Stone. I would hear the stories of how this guy enlisted in the Army to fight for his country, how he wanted to help others less fortunate then he was. I would see the photos released by his captors, the bruises from regular beatings he suffered very evident on his face. For six long weeks, everyone throughout Michigan held their breath for this man. Here he was, a guy from Capac, a town I called home for almost five years, being held against his will by what seemed to be a vicious and brutal enemy. After his release from captivity, secured by none other than the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the entire town broke out into an unfettered celebration.
I remember being there the day he came home. WJBK (Fox 2) teamed up with WWJ, WJBK, Art Van and The Parade Company of Detroit to put on a welcome home parade for him. I remember being in awe of the massive crowds that day. Members of the international media seemed to be everywhere that day: Time, BBC, NBC, ABC, CBS, New York Times. It felt surreal to be there in this otherwise quiet, nondescript Midwestern town that most people wouldn't think about twice. I remember the Air Force jets from nearby Selfridge Air Force Base flying overhead in tribute to this man, who had lived an otherwise normal life until being captured in Kosovo. Jets, that paid tribute to a man who had returned home to a hero's welcome, a symbol of a very successful war conducted against a genocidal madmen in eastern Europe. It wouldn't be until years later that former soldiers who had served with him finally spoke out, speaking of how he had been in the wrong place, at the wrong time, doing things he should not have been doing...of how he had been charged with adultery behind closed doors, the catalyst being that he had gone into a dangerous area to call a German girlfriend of his. Needless to say, this man that I once viewed as a hero now has a sullied reputation as a result of these revelations, even after having retired with the rank of Major from the Michigan National Guard earlier this year.
The 90s ended on a high note for not only myself, but my family. We were living the dream in the thumb of Michigan. I was finally making friends at school, we seemed to be on track to owning a house and the best part of it all was dad finally had his own truck. The future seemed to be very promising, and I was even considering getting into football for the first time, something I had never even thought of at any point in my life beforehand. We were really living what some called the dream, and we had the home to prove it.
It was about 15 years ago this past May that it all started to come undone. By early May, we had lost the house, and dad had lost that beautiful Freightliner of his. There was talk of moving again, this time back to Port Huron. I was crushed - the dreams I had of one day being a football star, the friends I would lose. I didn't take well to any of it, and by early May, we were back in Port Huron yet again. I missed my friends. I missed that beautiful three bedroom home we had. I missed being close to the lakeshore, but far from civilization as I knew it at that time. I would get the chance to do one final trip at my old school, going up to Mackinac Island for an entire weekend. It was part of a school trip that had been pieced together one final time, and I soaked in as much as I could of it. By the time it ended, I was back in Port Huron, without a single clue as to what I would do. I had been given an early summer break by the school district I was transferring into, the justification being that it was too late in the year to really do anything as far as academics were concerned. I fell into a slump - separated from everyone I knew back in Deckerville, and feeling isolated and at odds with the environment in which I lived. Then, on one day towards the end of my first month back in Port Huron, fate would meet me head on.
I had been wanting to meet new people for a few weeks. It had been quite some time since my last contact with old friends of mine from up towards Deckerville, and I was wandering up and down my street one hot afternoon when I met three interesting kids: Dustin, Justin and Brad. They invited me to hang out while they were shooting hoops. I had no problems with this, and immediately what I would remember as the best summer of my life for a little bit took off. Every day, we all seemed to be hanging out with one another. We would go down by the river to these old docks, where the guys would jump in to swim, while I would look on with amusement, yet too terrified of drowning to jump in. The nights seemed to blend in with the days, and in mid-summer, an old friend from up in Deckerville came to spend a few nights. We would constantly be hanging around one another, laughing, joking, wrestling...doing mainly whatever it is that American teenagers do. At select nights, I would find myself riding around with Justin and his brother Craig, all of us just endlessly cruising around the city with no objective, no real reason other than to just get out. Other nights would be spent on their front porch, talking all the way until daybreak at times. It helped lift me out of a depression I was falling into, and I welcomed it.
But that is not the fate I write of. That fate came in the form of a young man named Stuey. I vaguely remembered meeting him when I had first lived in Port Huron. This was during the summer of 97, and I vaguely remembered him being a bit of a jerk, roughing me up for no evident reason. It was during that weekend when my old friend from Deckerville visited that Stuey would fully come into the picture, complete with an attitude not unlike that of a few certain people I would encounter later at Job Corps. There would be a times I went with Stuey and a few other people: one night, we spray painted the side of someone's garage, a person who had managed to incur Stuey's wrath for being a "snitch" - I had never heard the term before that night, and I just went along with it, not realizing what was really going on with him. I followed him and these other guys as they went to an alley behind another house, growing increasingly uncomfortable with what I was getting myself into, and watched with muted shock and slight horror as they threw a brick through the car window of another person that had incurred Stuey's wrath. It was pretty evident from that moment that he was not a good person to be around, and I tried to make efforts to distance myself from him. The idea of being locked away in juvenile detention because of this guy, quite frankly, was not something I wanted to happen, let alone be a part of. His girlfriend's parents, who lived a few houses down from me, saw what kind of trouble he was, and made attempts to bar her from seeing him. It didn't work, evidently, as the last I had heard, she had a few kids with him. In time, I would become more and more outspoken against him, seeing him as a clear and direct threat to not only my safety, but that of others in the neighborhood. This as I continued to hang out with Dustin, who was slowly but surely becoming like his mother...strung out on drugs and bound for a life in and out of jail. I would suffer two beatings from Stuey in the end, which ended both times with him threatening to kill me initially at knife point and at gun point the second time for "talking shit" about him.
Ultimately, he ended up serving a brief prison sentence for his involvement in a drive-by shooting a few blocks away. It was rather thrilling to know that he was gone, and I admit today that I didn't exactly mourn his absence. The guy had been enough of a problem for me to begin with. He had managed to leave behind a 40 oz bottle of beer one night when both of my parents were gone, hiding it behind our couch in the living room (it was found a month or two later by my dad while doing house cleaning), as well as the two times he jumped me, along with quite possibly being the person responsible for throwing a brick through our front window. Naturally, he was able to secure an early release, and the last time I actually saw him, he was bragging to a mutual friend about how awesome prison was. In the end, it seems he got his wish, as he is now serving out for the following crimes: conspiracy to commit homicide, first degree homicide, kidnapping and accessory to the fact after a felony. I wonder at times if the last 10 or so years he has spent behind bars has shed any light for him on what kind of a person he is, and I often doubt any of that time has done much good for him. Even after all of these years, I still think of him and cannot help but associate anything other than the world "evil" with him. Small wonder I want to go into law enforcement one day after dealing with a person like him.
Outside of that, my worldview was strange for my first initial year or two in Port Huron. I had never been in a city of that size before, and had never been exposed to different cultures before. I still remember my gut reaction to the events of September 11th - how we needed to bomb the ever living daylights out of the Middle East, all the way back to the Stone Age if need be. I briefly found myself adopting racist views because of the influence of a few former peers, too - I still bear the shame of that to this day. In the end, it took befriending a few Arab Americans in the area and a few African Americans I lived nearby to change my entire view on matters of race. For a time, too, I wasn't even a fan, let alone a supporter, of people who were gay, lesbian, bi or transgender. I didn't see them as fellow human beings at the time. All I knew were the people I was surrounded by at the time, a number of whom were toxic in mind and in belief.
It was by early 2003 that my entire outlook began to change. I remember the drum beats to war in the Middle East building up louder and louder. I remember President George W. Bush, whose method of winning the 2000 election I had disagreed with, making a case without any proof, or even evidence, to go to war against Iraq for the second time. By that time, I had shaken off the reins of prejudice for good, having had even my own doubts about that mentality for the previous three years I was in Port Huron, electing to not talk to many people in my personal life who had come to be outright racists, sexists, outright homophobes even. I was slowly but surely making friends with people at school, and briefly had a love interest that through my own recklessness and willingness to listen to those previous people in my life had scorned in the most painful way possible. I was starting to wake up to the world around me, and it wasn't pretty.
I remember seeing the live video feed of bombs being dropped over Baghdad yet again. I remember seeing the tens of thousands of soldiers, Marines, sailors and airmen marching across the border from seemingly every direction. I remember asking myself what the point of all this was. I remember the scenes of carnage and destruction, of entire families blown to bits by wanton disregard for who the target was. It horrified me. I had already been striving to learn about different cultures for months, and especially those of people in the Middle East. I had learned of the hardships they had under brutal, bloodthirsty dictators, the core messages behind their respective religions (both the good strains and the bad strains), and I watched with mounting horror and confusion as it was insinuated that Saddam Hussein and Iraq somehow were involved with September 11th. I asked out loud...why are we not going after the people in Afghanistan, Bin Laden and his terror network, instead? I began to read up on the backgrounds of every member involved with George W. Bush's administration - all were connected to major oil corporations. I read up on exactly what Iraq had for natural resources - oil, and a lot of it - the catch was that much of it was embargoed by the U.N. since the days of the First Gulf War, when Iraq had broken international law by invading and occupying Kuwait. And the people who wanted access to that immense amount of oil for their own financial gains but couldn't because of those embargoes? The very same oil companies that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condeleeza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld were all associated with. The very same oil companies that, for over a decade, had publicly expressed the fact that they were pissed they could not have access to those oil fields for themselves. Everything fell into place all at one seemingly key moment, and I found myself horrified. Here I was, a year out from graduating high school, ready to step out into the world and start working towards a financially independent, successful and productive future, one in which I could retire, if not with a decent pension, then with Social Security, and yet our own President was reaching deep into that money and blowing it on a war to gain more oil for private companies? It spurred my interest in political and current events.
At home, dad had been away from truck driving for the better part of three years, the result of a bad accident in Ohio. He no longer could drive, and him and my mom had divorced in the time since. Mom, from what little I knew, was living in her car somewhere down in Detroit. Dad's immense anger towards her affected me to the point where even saying hi to her felt awkward. In many ways, I feel as if we, being myself and my brother, were brainwashed to hate her for the simple act of leaving. Hindsight, though, tells a different story: today, I can see that it was a marriage not meant to last at all, what with the lack of communication and very different mindsets. By all accounts, my mom was very much a party girl when my dad met her in the early 80s. My dad had been raised the opposite way by my grandfather: work hard before playtime. Coupling that with his brief time spent in the Army, and just the difference in personalities is very, very visible. I just never paid that much attention as a kid. Work was hard to come by in that entire 3 year period. Dad had managed to find a job working graveyards for a local security company, but there wasn't much else to be found. The mighty Big Three of the automotive industry were shutting down plants left and right, leaving not only thousands of workers from their plants left without any work, but also leaving hundreds more in supporting industries out of work because of the lessened amount of spending power in existence: retail, food service, health care, sanitation, construction, law enforcement, fire services, security...everybody hurt from each plant closing, and in response, seemingly every local college, ranging from SC4, to Baker, to even the University of Michigan down in Ann Arbor, swelled with new students. They even built a tech training building on the campus of SC4 because of the sudden influx of people who were suddenly out of work with no other real skills other than what they had from a lifetime spent in the plant.
Within the social services field, I watched as the number of people applying for disability out of sheer desperation to obtain any source of income in a suddenly destroyed economy mushroom, right in conjunction with the number of people on welfare. I would watch with growing horror as the Republicans in charge of the state responded with measures that were callous and almost inhumane: proposing obscene laws to conduct drug tests on the newly poor who were just trying to get a helping hand until things improved, stating in news interviews that it was everyone's fault for losing their job because of the unions, passing laws that dictated where those formerly employed factory workers (who were now homeless because of the crash in Michigan's economy) could and could not sleep, where they could use the restroom, where they could eat at...I watch as the Republican Party in Michigan reacted shrewdly and callously to a crisis that had been lurking ever since Nixon opened the doors to China in the early 70s. In Detroit, the news was exceedingly grim. I had never paid attention during the 90s to a great degree, but it seemed like every night, there were stories of people resorting to selling drugs to get by, engaging in prostitution...it was literally a parade of sorrow. There was a brief flash of hope when Kwame Kilpatrick was elected as mayor, but even he would fall in short order, having been the direct instigator of massive corruption unheard of in any other American city, and ultimately leave the city to file for bankruptcy, a consequence of Kilpatrick's terrible mismanagement, in conjunction with that of a hopelessly corrupt and ineffective City Council and a larger than life mayor in the form of Coleman A. Young. A later in-depth story conducted by the Detroit Free Press would ultimately show that decades of bad decisions, corruption and poorly handled government over numerous Democratic and Republican administrations in Detroit was the real cause of the bankruptcy, but Kilpatrick was the ultimate zenith and final nail in the coffin.
Even on simple trips to Detroit, I would come home depressed after seeing what I did. Block after block of dilapidated homes. Endless rows of now abandoned factories that had folded only months before, if not years before. Entire skyscrapers in and around the downtown area completely abandoned and left to the mercy of the elements. Countless homeless and poor, none of whom had a way to make a stable living anymore. The western suburbs, southern suburbs and northern suburbs were no better for me. Inkster, once known as the city where Motown was born at, now reduced to a city full of corrupt cops and hopelessly poor citizens. Westland, an equally crime ridden area with no real jobs aside from what one could find for a brief period of time...mostly flipping burgers or working for a temporary basis in retail. Wayne, a city that has suffered immensely from the loss of the old Ford plant there. In the northern sections of Wayne County, Roseville and Mt. Clemens, all rapidly turning into a giant rust belt as the former auto suppliers that served as the bloodlines of the Big Three shuttered and closed up while the plants they served relocated overseas, the result of greed driven CEOs who wanted to pay less in wages and less for materials to save more money for themselves. Romulus, Southgate, Trenton and several other cities would suffer equally as well. And our elected leaders in the state House would demonize the populations of each one of these cities as being at fault for not wanting to work, for just wanting free government handouts while playing the role of Cadillac Welfare Queens. I would see the denials that the decline of all of these cities was directly due to the destruction brought inadvertently by the closure of so many manufacturing plants, and I would grow furious.
In 2004, I would be finally old enough to vote, but it was an exercise in futility. The contestants for the office of President that year were John Kerry and George W. Bush for a second term. I initially saw hope with Howard Dean, but that hope would fade in the light of his supposed "meltdown" on the campaign trail. The conservative media was ruthless, and in the end, those of us who identified as liberal were left with a very watered down candidate in the form of John Kerry. Kerry, a man who once stood before Congress and blasted his own government for it's highly unethical and unnecessary war conducted in Vietnam, a man who once stood outside of Capitol Hill with thousands of other veterans to throw the medals he had onto the steps. Kerry, by 2004, was a corporate shill, having married into the Heinz family, themselves best known for mass producing condiments such as relish, mustard and ketchup. Desperate for some sort of change, no matter how moderate, I cast my vote for Kerry. In the end, I still watched on election night as Bush walked towards a virtual second term, having used 9/11 and terrorism throughout his entire campaign to almost scare Americans into voting for him. With his victory was a continued Republican dominance in Congress. By that point, the war in Iraq had been settled, into to turn into a disastrous occupation that was draining us monetarily. Through it, we also saw all hell break loose as a civil war broke out between two different factions in Iraq. On the international front, most of western Europe hated our guts, while what few allies we did have for Iraq were only there after having been seemingly bullied into doing so by President Bush. At home, the Republicans continue to pass laws allowing for our own state security agencies to spy on us without warrants. I watched with dismay as anti-union laws were passed in state after state. I watched with extreme dismay as bills were passed that allowed for our tax dollars to be used to prop up banks that were in danger of going under due to their own reckless stupidity and arrogant disregard for consumer protection laws, while still more laws were passed that allowed American companies to relocate the bulk of their operations in nations where slavery was all but legal. I watched, pained, as the ability for Americans stuck in dire financial straits was stripped away as Republicans made it easy for creditors to pursue debtors using whatever means necessary, even to the point where a debtor landed on the streets, unable to stay afloat financially but still forced under the law to continue paying that debt as they went from shelter to shelter, bridge to bridge, with no way out. I watched as Republicans made the ability to declare bankruptcy as a last resort nearly impossible. And it tripled my anger.
I questioned if this was the same country that had done so much good in the past for it's middle class and it's poor. I had read before of FDR's seemingly titanic efforts to uphold the poor into a better position in life. I had read of Johnson's seemingly endless war waged to end poverty, of Teddy Roosevelt's fight to improve working conditions, food and drugs at the very turn of the 20th century. I watched with even greater horror during 2007, as the Democratic Party immediately seized control of Congress, but then proceeded to bail out banks whose irresponsible, almost illegal predatory practices had landed millions of unsuspecting homeowners onto the streets, and then watched with horror yet again as the remainder of the economy across the nation crashed, plunging even more millions into inescapable poverty, while the architects of the disaster on Wall Street were propped up by our own government, to the extent where they were given billions that then ended up being doled out as bonuses to CEOs who should have been in prison for the rest of their lives, not allowed to walk free and continue to eat caviar and play golf.
That was the first real stirrings of discontent I had with banks. I haven't trust them in the years since, but the sad reality is that we live in a system today where you cannot get by without a bank account. It's virtually the law of the land. I did have hope back in 2008 with Barack Obama. I really did. I remember thinking to myself that it was awesome to see someone who finally gets it, that it was awesome to see someone who was actually going to make a difference. And now, as 2016 approaches, I wonder what the hell I was thinking.
In the time since 2008, I watched as the Democratic Party presented a new way forward with health coverage in this country. Most know it to be Obamacare, but I still continue to call it the Patient Affordable Care and Protection Act. It sounded like a masterpiece when it was first brought up: here, for the first time in our nation's history, was the promise of a universal health care system where you would not go broke just from seeing a doctor. All of 2009 passed, and early 2010 hit, before the entire bill itself was passed by Congress. By the time it was finished, I had found myself with diminished respect for our President and Congress. The health insurance industry took what could have been a great, amazing thing and twisted it out of proportion, sending their talking heads onto CNN, Fox News and anywhere else they could think of to essentially argue that this idea was tantamount to socialism, and that it wouldn't work here because they tried it in Europe and it has been a disaster, all facts aside and proof aside. In the end, as a result of the pressure put on Congress (and to a slight degree President Obama), we were left with a clusterfuck of a law where no matter what, you still have to purchase health insurance through a private company, although the upside is that at least they don't bar you based on pre-existing conditions anymore. If you're under a certain income level, your only two real options? Medicaid or Medicare, neither of which fully cover a person's medical, dental or vision needs. It was, in the end, a twisted, bloated version of something that originally had good intentions, but now only continues to stand to benefit the health insurance industry's profit margins. And we never got a say in the matter.
While the occupation of Iraq ended, we are still mired in an endless conflict in Afghanistan, even with limited numbers of military personnel over there. There have been efforts to make peace with the Taliban, to even allow them a seat at the table, but to no avail. It seems as if for that part of the world, it is better to leave it alone. The tribal differences alone cannot be solved with mere cash payments or empty promises of democracy that few actually adhere to. As far as international relations, while they have improved to a certain degree, we have a lot of damage to fix for decades of bad, cruel, inhumane and blatantly undemocratic actions committed by previous administrations. With regards to the job market, nobody is doing anything to fix it. If anything, given recent news, we are poised to end up in yet another foolish international trade agreement that is certain to see even more American jobs end up vanishing and reappearing in another country, courtesy of the Trans Pacific Partnership, which to my dismay the President is all for. There has been no real movement to eliminate student debt, either - it is rapidly approaching a breaking point, and the Republicans more than anyone continue to fight off efforts to simply forgive most student debt and make higher education cost-free in this country. To tell the truth, I don't see anyone in Congress or the White House even trying to make it happen, and at this stage, no matter what party ends up in the White House next, it's a given that it will be a corporate sellout in the form of someone like Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush. The problem of poverty has not been seriously addressed, either, as there are even more restrictions on social welfare programs such as the SNAP Program, Section 8 and Social Security that are now on the books, while off in the background the only real growth in the job market has been through part time, minimum wage work for fast food and retail that does not even begin to offset the cost of living. As for a better skilled, higher paying job? Employers as a trend appear to be looking more and more at hiring immigrants willing to work for less. Education, experience and training all appear to be nothing compared to the fact that someone will work for very little money in exchange for a job title. And in the interest of disclosure and fairness, I am one of those millions trapped in poverty with what seems to be no clear way out. The reality, for me, is that trickle down economics are very much what is being imposed on us as citizens.
The only other area that has seen any growth? The so-called "share" economy, or what others would call the "1099 economy". I fall directly into that category, having for an undetermined amount of time in the future to rely on driving as an independent contractor for Lyft, constantly worrying about what people think of me - a thing made very real because passengers rate you based on what they think of you and not how you conduct your job, and constantly worrying if whether or not I will even be able to pay a bill on time in light of the fare cuts the company made before Uber, a competitor, made them permanent by lowering their prices as well - all at the expense of drivers such as myself. Couple that with no advertising being done by the main company I drive for, Lyft, in my area, and extremely low rates with few passengers, and it is no wonder why our economy is in such a bad shape.
In many ways, politically, both parties are to blame for the mess we are in, along with irresponsible, reckless individuals within the business realm. Equally culpable are the voters who continue to vote in leaders in both parties who do nothing to help heal the entire nation...leaders who only get voted in based on their looks or their religious beliefs, or how likeable they could possibly be at a party, or even how down home they seem. Either way, that has been the gist of my life, and why I believe what I believe in, as a start. Coming in future posts will be further tidbits to expand upon my own backstory, as well as thoughts on current events and political matters.
My name is Chris, I'm a 30 year old poor guy who hopes to make a difference somehow, and this is my blog. Welcome, and I'm happy to have you all along for the ride.
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