We grew up on food stamps and guess what that bought you? Sugar filled juicy-juice drinks, white bread, and all sorts of other garbage that made sure your health would suffer the rest of your life.
My siblings grew up in stability, because I sacrificed my high school and college years working multiple jobs. They were able to study and get degrees or take a year off just because they felt like it, with no pressure to help or pay it forward in any way. Me being the oldest, I sacrificed EVERYTHING. I regret that so much now.
Every single disadvantaged group I see comes from something. My parents came from a shack in the village. How does one go to college instead of working when your parents are struggling? I dropped out to support my parents financially. Now that I'm 30+, I make decent income but have no degree. Everyone who goes on to be a doctor, lawyer, etc. has stability I could only dream of. Their whole life is sculpted and gardened by people around them since birth.
Now that I make just a little bit of income I don't qualify for any grants, subsidies, nothing because I'm "middle class". Meanwhile I see people running cash businesses and showing they make $30k on paper while getting handouts left and right. I don't qualify for scholarships because I make "too much". My closest friends who I went to school with who also were "poor" lived in a house as they grew up. Or their parents had a business in their home country or started one here that they handed off to them. Everyone buying a house had their parents lending them money. Everyone who bought their first car had their parents insuring them to save money.
I'm just so frustrated. Literally makes me want to ALT+F4 life because of how frustrating and bullshit this whole system is. The people who are truly disadvantaged who come from negative get NOTHING. Instead this country focuses on the color of skin and sexual orientation, while forgetting who truly is disadvantaged and who truly comes from NOTHING.
Instead this country focuses on the color of skin and sexual orientation, while forgetting who truly is disadvantaged and who truly comes from NOTHING.
A new member of my crew immigrated here from Guatemala 6 years ago. He is now 24 and has learned English to the point where there is no accent. My wife has been a citizen for 18 years and still has a very strong accent. My Guate buddy took his opportunity by the horns and hasn't let go. He is amazing and has used the system(s) to the best of his ability.
He joined the USAF to get ahead and it has proved to be one of the best moves he made. He recently finished paramedic school paid for by the GI Bill. This is a story as old as time, and my grandfather did the same thing after swimming across the rio grande in 1934, except is was called the US Army Air Corps.
I say all that to say, you can lament your current station in life all you want. Just know that nothing will change if you sit in the corner all pissed off. The other option is to recognize that you are in control of how you respond to adversity. There are two options when one feels they have been slighted; 1. Get angry, stay angry, and pout. 2. Brush it off and have another go in a different way.
Some ideas that you may or may not like:
You can still join a military guard or reserve unit. That will unlock a LOT of benefits and you might actually like it. There are always government jobs that pay ok, but offer tuition reimbursement, pensions and other benefits in lieu of high pay. Apprenticeships with the trades (electrician, plumber, HVAC) can lead to making a LOT of money and owning your own business.
After all is said and done, there are more than one way to skin a cat. (I don't condone cat violence)
1. Much of your frustration is not with America, but with your family, and specifically your parents. It is your parents who fought, it is your parents who took in the stranger, it is your parents who beat you, it is your parents who expected that you would get a job and support everyone else so that they could have stability. (I am not an expert, but from what I understand, this is a typical expectation in families that come from third-world cultures.)
America isn't magic. Coming here doesn't automatically fix your family.
2. For all that you see that is unfair, or needing improvement, not coming here would have been worse. You make a decent income? You would not have in the village. Your parents fought over money every day? They would have in the village also. You grew up on nothing? You probably would have in the village also.
You sacrificed your own opportunity to give your siblings a better life. You're bitter about it. (I probably would be, too.) But it is also an honorable thing. It's honorable in third-world cultures; but I think it even gets some honor in America. (Some. There are also plenty who will mock you for being a sucker. I think they are wrong, but they are there.)
Whether honorable or not (I think it was), whether wise or not (perhaps not), you did what you did. It is now water under the bridge. What should you do now?
First, don't ALT+F4 life! Instead, what can you change?
Can you go to any of your siblings and say, "Look, I gave up my chance at college to give you stability; now I need you to help me with college"?
Even if not: Being in America, 30+, making a decent income but no degree... that isn't the worst starting position for the rest of your life. If you sit around and feel bitter, this may be as good as it will ever get. But if you look around, you can probably find some things that would 1) make for a better life for you when you're 35, and 2) be actually within your ability to reach. Start working toward those things.
You do not drive a car looking backwards. You did things in the past that, on reflection, you see as people taking advantage of you. You can't change that. But stop looking back at it and start moving forward from where you are.
So far this has been mostly about material things. But internally, I think you need to forgive your parents for their own brokenness, and their unreasonable expectations. You need to forgive yourself for letting yourself be taken advantage of. And you also need to stop looking for your own joy in material or financial success. America sells that dream, but it's empty. Things and money don't satisfy. Still try to improve your situation, but the American dream leaves you empty. Make friends that you enjoy spending time with. Find some activities that give you pleasure. I think God is there; find him. In those things you find real joy, real meaning. More money doesn't do it.
America is in a dangerous position right now because they've let financial inequality grow too big - which, historically, precedes a sharp decline/collapse or a revolution (bloody as in civil war, or peaceful as in rebooting government). This is also why people are voting for crazies like Trump: He promises to fix things, and that's what people want to hear because they know it's all broken and no other politician will even admit there's a problem. Trump is of course toxic and will destroy everything, but that's beside the point because the people have lost hope and they need to hear something good for a change, even if it's an obvious lie. But I digress...
Yeah, you got shafted. But you're still young, and you can take that knowledge of the inherent unfairness and start making things work for you instead of staying in the box they've prepared for you. The people who get ahead know what rules to keep and what rules they can break. Learn from them.
This is nothing new. It's always the same story because in the beginning of an empire, it actually is true that things are (mostly) fair and you have every opportunity if you work hard. But over time it starts to decay, and eventually it becomes not true. Even George Orwell knew that ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxer_(Animal_Farm) ).
Take this as your first real life lesson (there will be many more).
The only other advice I can give is: The poor people work for their money. The rich people make their money work for them. How do you get enough money that it can start working for you? That's the trick - it's always changing. Right now the money is in luxury goods and subsistence goods (ultra rich goods and ultra poor goods) because the middle class has been hollowed out, so they're not buying middle class goods.
I’ll tell you a similar story. I’ll have to simplify and leave out some details, as you’ll see. My ancestors immigrated to America too. They too had nothing but the clothes on their backs. They did have one tiny advantage: America was giving away free land. So when they arrived in the 1700s, they got a homestead. Of course, there was no infrastructure. No running water, no roads, no electricity. They built a cabin and plowed a field and lived in poverty for their entire lives. Their children helped out on the farm from a young age, and occasionally attended school when it was available. They soon got itchy feet and wanted to move away from crowded areas. One of them took his wife and joined an expedition that headed west over the Appalachian Mountains, then sailed down the Cumberland River. Most of the group stopped and founded a little town called Nashville, TN, but my ancestor and a few others thought that the area was far too crowded so they kept going. At the fork of the Red River they turned north and sailed up river. Eventually they found a nice spots and started building cabins. Later the town of Adams, TN was founded there. When they built that cabin their nearest neighbor was building their own cabin 20 miles away. They lived there in poverty for their entire lives. They helped raise the first church, and helped pay a teacher to run a school. They worked constantly to improve life for their children. It was four or five generations before my family achieved what you and I would call stability.
Ok, so you didn’t have the advantage of free land, nor the back breaking labor of clearing it and farming it. But you had the advantage that someone else had already built the infrastructure we rely so heavily on. As a result, you yourself achieved what it took my family five generations to do. Like you, I didn’t qualify for financial aid or scholarships. I had nobody to help me pay for car insurance, or to lend me money. Nothing but whatever I could earn for myself. I went to college for one year, failed most of my classes (basically almost everything except Calculus), dropped out, and went into software engineering. Of course I have been annoyed to find myself applying for jobs only to be told that they only hire people with degrees, but it hasn’t ruined my life.
> Instead this country focuses on the color of skin and sexual orientation…
This is a very new phenomena, and in fact it is really only a very vocal minority who do so. Unfortunately for us normal people, it is a minority who universally went to college and now dominate a particular political party. 80 or 90% of the country have no care for what color your skin is. All they care about is how hard you work. Your boss at whatever job you pick is going to care more about your work ethic than almost anything else. If you start a business of your own, you will care more about your employees’ work ethic than almost anything else :)
I recommend that you take the long view. Find a stable job, marry, start a family, raise some children well, and make sure that they do better in life than you. Forget about anything you have seen on TV; that’s the real American Dream. And don't forget that you’ve already helped your siblings have a better life than you. Take some satisfaction from that, and teach your children to find the same satisfaction where they can.