Ferguson and occupy wall street protesters, say my life sucks!

*writers note… I started to end 2014 with a posting, like so many others, with a review of the year but a funny thing happened as I started to think about where to start. So much of 2014 has dealt with people protesting wrongs or perceived wrongs that made their lives, well……suck. Yes I know I could use a more dignified word but to the millions of people out there who feel they are living a life unjustly tainted with poverty and hatred I thought I should address this subject in plane language instead.

The moving men struggled to lift the old, heavy refrigerator up the stairs to my apartment. If they only knew that it was broken and would not even turn on, they would never have worked so valentley to deliver it. I was newly married and had an arguement with my wife which resulted in me moving out. With two kids and the wife to support there wadsn’t much money left over so I ended up with a second floor apartment, (more like closet), in a crime infested section of West Philadelphia. I was a butt-head and knew full well the diasgreement was my fault and I also knew we would in the end resolve it. However I still needed a place to live so I found this month to month apartment… which was barely a step above a homeless shelter.

With only a couple pieces of furniture in the place, when I wasn’t at work, I would spend my waking hours by the window….sketching. First the old eighteen hundreds style homes across the narrow street, then I would attempt to capture the people and their daily comings and goings. As the charcoal lines filled the page I looked for answers to whose fault it was that I was in my present situation. You see I was for a time like the many million’s of Americans, blaming others for their crappy current situations. These same people would never look to themselves as the reason for their not having a nice apartment, home or car. They would blame everyone but themselves for not having any money to pay their bills, (never noticing the hundreds of small, nonessential purchases that drained what little money they did have).

Across the nation when protesters were recently interviewed the common thread was that it was someone elses fault for the way they were treated and how their lives turned out. They said they were also ‘entitled’ to what the ‘rich people’, (*ie anyone that supported themselves and found a way to save some money), had and that they were discriminated aganest because they were poor. My question would be exactly why do you think your poor and living in poverty?

What I see as fact is that the large majority have no one to blame for their present life but themselves, and that the way they are living right now was determined by actions and decisions they took leading up to this minute. Yes I will admit a small number are there because of some emotional problems that blur their reasoning about what is good form them or not, but even these few are by their own inaction to seek help, responsible for their present lives. Please do not think I am writing about people that truly have mental issues for them I can only pray for their well being. It is those that time and time again make a wrong choice and can not see that the choices they made are not beneficial to their well-being.

To the ‘occupy’ protesters I can only agree with you that business are looking out only for themselves, but then a business must make a profit to survive, and can you actually begrudge them of making unbelievably large profits? I am sure you would not turn down a job that pays you five times what you are worth because the person working beside you is only making one tenth of that salary. To the Ferguson protesters who perceive that their present condition is because of race I can only say…You are correct that in many instances the people you deal with are prejudice. We know there are far too many people in this nation that hate and look down on others because of their skin color, their religion or what country they were born in. Well the reality is we can not change them on bit, they will continue to treat anyone that doesn’t look like them intolerantly. Since we can not change them and their view of others, I feel we must try to ignore them with their stupidity and arrogance and not base every decision in our lives on their hatred of others. We are not poor because others do not like us but because of the decisions we have made in our own personal lives.

Yes I say (we) when I use the word poor, because I live month to month on my social security check and do not have enough money to even rent an apartment. I live in a cabin with no electricity or running water by choice and rent free thanks to the owner, otherwise I would surely be in some homeless shelter. The solution to making ones life not suck is…. changing the way you perceive and do things. You can not go back in time and change mistakes we have made, but we can either radically or incrementally change the way we do everything in our life from this day forward.

We can accept the lowest paying job and then get a second one so we have enough to live on.
We can choose to spend that paycheck only on rent, food, utilities and bills.
We can look after our health both emotionally as well as physically.
We should not look to others for reasons why we are not moving forward
We can teach our children to not hate others when we see hatred in the world.
and we should turn to God and ask him to guide us on our new path in life…