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.