Love, Family, & Being Free

FD Thornton 2016

It getting close to the end of the month and if you’re like me that means its slim pickins’ for everything from the pantry, to fuel in the truck, right down to how much toilet paper you got. But that’s how it is for the working poor. For a really long time I wouldn’t embrace the idea that we were poor. I remember my grandmother once telling during the Great Depression they were too poor to realize they were poor. I suppose you can take that to mean if poverty is a way of life, what other way do you know.

I suppose you can take that to mean many number of things. Like if you’ve lived in abusive relationships long enough you tend to consider that the norm. Or if you have been called names all your life you tend to think that maybe they’re right and I am worthless scum. It’s pretty easy for us to be conditioned into thinking we are of less value than you really are. I think the difference comes when you see yourself coming from a comfortable life and then loss those comforts. In that situation it can make you angry and resentful that something was taken away from you.

I totally get it. Even in my own life I was much more valuable moneywise decades ago than I am now. For many years it seemed to be a running joke when I did my taxes I earned less than the year before. So for a long time I too was mad. Mad at what the world was becoming and mad it what I had become, worthless. All that internal turmoil was eating me up, but thankfully I worked to turn that anger into positive steps to improve myself. You may ask, did you plan work? And the answer would be yes and no. Yes in the fact that I accomplished a ton of goals I never thought I could; and no to the idea that those accomplishments would ever bring about change.

You can work really hard to achieve a goal, but just like a dog chasing down a car, what is he going to do with it when he catches it? Life is a long series of lessons if you really think about it, you never really should stop learning. The problem that some of us have is we refuse to keep learning. Ten years ago when I began my journey to better my situation, the goal was to make a better life for me and my family. But as the years rolled on the rules changed. It would have been easy for me to walk off mad at the world and left it at that. Instead I took a look at myself and changed the plan. I took what I had learned about myself and applied it to creating a better world around me.

In the society which we live we are blessed with choices. We can either remain angry at who we perceived as having it easier than us. Or we can open our eyes to the injustice happening all around us and do something. Change without thought isn’t change at all, it’s simply having a temper tantrum without giving much thought to the outcome. For real change to begin it all starts with us. We live in a society of misfits, a motley crew if you would; that seized on the opportunity to come together for the greater good. To create a society were “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights”. To believe anything less would be to hold these truths with less regard. So instead of putting down your neighbor for being different, how about embracing the things you hold common like love, family, and being free.