Being serious, sarcastically: My mom had this moment where she reached six-figure salary for a couple of years, because she had some charisma and was good at selling houses. I was too young to appreciate how, largely poor my family was before this. I mean, i remember enjoying those ketchup and white bread sandwiches for lunch. I was less of a fan of my dad's back seat seatbelt jamming on me and getting me stuck enough that we had to get help extracting me from the seat of his car. There are these pock-mark memories that are personal proof i was just blissfully innocent midst pretty serious poverty. But, yeah, we had this little moment, where my grandpa had just retired, the og .com bubble hadn't popped, so the shares he had in his employer weren't worthless yet, and my mom was making six figures selling houses.

Well anyway, her job gets legislated out of existence, because the houses she sold probably put too much property into the hands of poors, and before she can adjust, her body just violently explodes. Like several body parts start failing and she develops COPD from y ears of heavy smoking.

So she can't work, and even if she could, she's gotta figure out how to roll with the changing markets - but that never happens because she enters a coma, and wakes up needing long term disability.

Well luckily my mom paid the lifetime cap into SSDI - so she has that right?

Right?

Yes, three years from the first application, after hiring a lawyer that promptly took a large cut of the meager backpay. Lifetime cap SSDI still pays out below the poverty line and you can't make money without having that garnished or outright taken away, depending.

So I'm growing up, watching, and eventually helping her navigate the fed bureaucracy, private insurance corporations, many almost-deaths, some of which came about due to the fact medicare just doesn't cover modern options for some problems, especially relating to COPD and lung problems. I'm growing up, and rather than going to school, I'm more or less holding a family together by blood, sweat, tears, and cashing in every favor i ever made and every ounce of good will i ever earned, continuously trying to sustain life in poverty, myself eventually working minimum wage gigs to try and supplement - we never really got any breathing room.

I set aside every need I had to sustain the people I loved, and just like annihilated my mental health in a dozen ways, and it nearly killed me.

So, at the intersection of the alleged promise of what the United States is, the reality of what it is, the life I had to live, the injustices I had to endure and witness in the process, and the spiral of my life taking me where it took me in the process, took me from someone probably destined to become a ride or die capitalist, into a proud America loving patriot I want to destroy this nation and everything it stands for