How many of you remember when these United States of America were the supreme icon of First-World culture throughout the whole of the planet? Me neither. But I remember reading about those times as a child. I was in awe at what my world was, a child in the U.S., even as a wee little ten-year-old. My parents both worked and my neighborhood, while not a perfect world, was as safe as anyone could ask. Neither of my parents worked prestigious jobs, raking in stacks of cash to hide away for a rainy day or a child's college tuition later on in life, but we had everything we ever needed and most often, everything we wanted too.
Daily, during the school year, I'd walk home with the same friend I walked home with every day, stop at Mrs. Liddy's house (a very kind old lady I had sold something from a fund-raiser to once who insisted that we stop by every now and then to say hi - this turned into a daily routine,) part ways with said friend at the corner to my street, then head home. After doing my homework (usually,) I'd run right back out. Whether I was meeting up with that same friend or just some of the ones right around my house, or just wandering the streets (and surrounding wooded areas,) myself, I was entertained.
I didn't have a smartphone, I didn't have a laptop, I didn't have a blog, website, or Facebook page. I did have a walkman and a Gameboy though, so I guess there's that. But I also had routine physicals, dental checkups, trips to family therapy sessions when Mom and Dad weren't seeing eye to eye, sleepovers at friends' houses, boy scout meetings, campouts, basketball practice, frequent trips to the park, summer vacations with the family, cookouts, fishing trips, a late curfew, trust from my parents and other adults in my life and God knows what else. What bothers me about America, this world in general now, it's all tot complex and I've been unable to supply a fraction of this to my own children.
We're not poor, mind you. We have a roof over our head and the neighborhood here isn't too bad. But after working for the same company for nine long and very dedicated years (a few months shy of ten if we're being honest,) I was forced out after a number of regime changes that led to a work environment that was just unfathomable. Since then, even with ten years dedicated service and rave reviews from colleagues and supervisors, finding a steady and remotely decent paying replacement job has proved arduous to say the least.
Now, this might be acceptable for some, at least for a run of the mill type position, but in those ten years, I was not your average employee. I started out in a simple position - they bring me papers with locations of product, I update said locations in our proprietary software. That lasted three days. Then I began billing out customer shipments, checking the work of other colleagues, billing out customer shipments for the other two departments, proofing, answering phones, working extra shifts, staying late hours, working extra days (to the point I had one single day off the first thirty days I was there and a grand total of three days off in the first ninety days I was there.) I then was tasked with PC repair and maintenance, light networking and network troubleshooting, toner refill, purchasing, inventory control, and even the random bout of forklift operation. Before my hire-on date with the company itself (this was still with the temp agency that got me this job,) I had even begun training other newcomers (and even some of those who had arrived before me.)
I saw no increase in pay for any of this, though it was explained that I would, and in fact had to fight for the $0.50 bump I finally managed when hired on as a permanent employee. This was after the first regime change, by the way. And so it would go for the next nine years or so until the unsafe work environment that had developed around me was too dangerous and the rules governing it and what my actions with it should be too convoluted. While not on the greatest terms with the invalids in charge of the company when I left, I was still on good terms with many colleagues still working there and past supervisors and employees that had left before I made it out. These have been my references since.
I am adept on any forklift or boom out there, know every office suite on the market inside and out (from Microsoft to the open source jobs like OOO and Libre,) do some coding, network infrastructure, proofreading, TOS/SOP design and wording, managerial, training, job-site first aid, and what I don't know on a computer I learn very quickly. So why is it that I can't get a job and pay worthy of these skills? Well, the biggie is I've done all this from the ground up with no degree. Today, very few serious organizations will even look at you without a four-year degree. I can run circles around most finishing up their sixth year of their four-year-degree, but they've got that paper.
America is broken. Unless you come from money or dedicate your life to education, you're damned to a life mundane. Mind you, I understand there are plenty of cases where folks like myself managed to get into a decent company at ground-level and work their way to as close to the top as they would like to, but I assure you there are more of me out there than there are of them.
Trade schools, paid internships/training (have any of you tried getting an electrical apprenticeship lately? It's about the only field I can think of any more that still has this option in some select areas,) and other such 'ways in' to a successful life have all but disappeared replaced by temp agencies that promise, and typically fail, to land you that job in your field anywhere at all. The cost of tuition and supplies for even local colleges have gone up exponentially (something to the tune of seven times what they were in the 1950's - though I can't recall the source, this was from an article my fiance was reading,) making it nearly impossible to pay off whatever education you do manage (save maybe an associates in the arts at your community college,) without landing a true dream-job.
We're now born into the debts of our fathers, tripling it, and leaving it for our own children to worry about. This in a time where now in Texas, at least one arrest has been made for an outstanding student loan. We arrest parents who aren't caught up with child support - because a parent sitting in a jail cell is really going to make a better effort to get those arrears paid up. On top of that, our taxes are docked if we don't have insurance on ourselves. I'm all for socialized medical insurance - a sick nation is a non-working nation - but if I chose to pay my own damn doctor bills, leave me the fuck alone. Now to top it all off, the elephant in the room, all of us have paid into Social Security for our entire working lives, but who among us are going to be able to collect?
It's broken. Putting a broken individual in charge of it isn't going to fix it. Letting Donald trump run this nation like Hitler with an abacus (look, I'm not the asshole insisting my constituents raise their hands and pledge allegiance to me - if you don't like being compared to Der Führer, stop acting like him,) or electing Hillary Clinton, who can't even maintain sensitive information (something I'm pretty sure someone explained to her at some point,) will be the greatest mistake we, this country's citizens, as a whole have ever made. Please open up your eyes and minds, Americans, and think before you arbitrarily check off the name of a would-be tyrant or national security destroyer. Think. I know wer're trained not to these days, but try.
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