bono_212
Blue Crack Distributor
This x10000.
I have recounted my own experience here a number of times. I was a child refugee, separated from my parents and in foster care in another country with strangers and a language I did not speak. I had my 8 year old brother that I had to take care of and nobody and nothing else. We were eventually reunited and came to Canada with nothing, not a penny to our name and not anything other than the clothes on our backs. As an extra bonus point, and you can't make this shit up if you tried, Air Canada lost our one checked suitcase and never recovered it, I think we got $600 at some point later on. Again we didn't speak the language. My Mom went to graduate school in Toronto, became a very successful education consultant and published a pretty successful book (if you're a teacher anyway). My Dad never quite recovered because of language barriers and worked hard at manual labour jobs until he retired at just over 65. I became a corporate lawyer, I graduated first in my elementary school (despite arriving in the country 2 years prior without speaking English), first in my high school and third in my law school. Became a corporate lawyer and worked in probably the best Canadian corporate firm and worked as a corporate lawyer for them in NYC as well. My brother is a teacher. We worked hard and were poor as fucking dirt. Everything I have now, I mean everything, came from a combination of my own ambition and hard work and the help I received from the country that owed me nothing but gave me everything. That is why I have a deep sense of duty to people who maybe weren't as lucky or maybe were just too tired to fight as hard. If I can help them then that is what I have to do. My husband and I do really, really well, not as a point of bragging but to conclude the story.
So when these people, whether they be rural Canadians or rust belt Americans start telling me about how hard their lives are and how I am the smug elite who doesn't get them - fuck right off, guys. Because you didn't see death first hand as a child, because your economic situation growing up was roughly a thousand times better than mine. I could be very smug now and look at you and conclude that maybe if YOUR ass pulled itself up by the bootstraps like you like to preach at the "welfare queens" maybe you'd have put 2 and 2 together and realized that you're living in a dying town with a dying industry and done something about it. Maybe you wouldn't be waiting for the government to save you like some sort of lazy socialist. But no, instead I keep voting and behaving in ways to assist you and frankly I'm kind of getting tired of it. So maybe it's really time you go out there and fend for yourselves and I throw off the shackles of noblesse oblige and go off hand in hand with those elites that you despise.
Holy crap. I did *not* know that story. Wow. Ever thought of writing a book?
People have to mire themselves in debt even to have a fighting chance at economic comfort. IMO the only candidate who understood that and made it a campaign priority was Sanders, and that's why I supported him while he was around.
I--What? Clinton's entire campaign from 08 revolved around debt-free public education and the only reason she wasn't as vocal about it this time was because the debates prevented it. It was still at the forefront of her site, her social media presence, her stump speeches, etc.
This is why I feel like no one ever listened past "EMAILS!" on either side of the aisle. It seems like no one ever actually paid any attention whatsoever to what her policies were. It wasn't like she hid them.