Life never takes you where you think you're headed. It gives you all the bumps and detours it can to get you wherever the hell you wind up. Life ain't made to be easy. The natural state of things is conflict. Always one side tryin' to get over on the other. Someone always makin' a move that's better for them and worse for you.
Someone made a move against me that made them a lotta money and cost me my job. I made a move to make more money and work fewer hours, meanwhile, it left my department without a leader. It was better for me but not for them. It's not what I wanted to do but what I had to do to survive. I hate havin' to leave them but the ground got ripped out from under me. It was a wonderful team of people I had workin' with me and I feel like I let ém down.
Big corporations will always be concerned with the number of dollars they make and never the number of lives they break. I now work with my family. Same business we've had since '88. It bought my clothes and my food. It saved my ass more than twice and taught me how to work too hard. I live my life influenced by my father and the way he handles his business. This place is home.
I look back a few months and I can see a day when I come into work after a racist white girl has already called a man a nigger and a woman a bitch. All they could do was walk away from conflict, surrender the ground and their pride to customer service. Got a call yesterday, man says we have no right to fly an American flag on a Latino owned business, he got a tongue lashing for his trouble. The natural state of things is conflict and I ain't gotta run from it anymore.
Things ain't the same as they used to be. More and more people are without work. The ones that have work to do are gettin' their hours or their pay cut. Whatever happened to one person bein' able to get a quality education through high school so he could get a job, work 40 hours and have enough to live on? Somebody squeezed all the independent thought they could out of the American people to create this bastardized version of the American dream.
Used to be if you worked hard you could be anything you wanted. Now, it seems no matter how much you work you won't ever have enough. There's no limit to what you have to do and you gotta do it all all alone until you work yourself to death. You need a need a high school diploma, need a bachelor's, need a master's, need loans, need a good job, so does your spouse, need 2 cars, need a big house, need some credit cards, need insurance, need better clothes, need nicer things, need to quit bein' lazy, need to quit complainin'. All you want is to live.
It's a hard life right now and pointin' fingers won't help. It's not just Obama, it's not just Bush, it's not just Clinton, there were bad decisions made for the last fifty years or more that put us in this corner. It's gonna take fifty years of good decisions to get us out. Good leaders don't make plans for a day they make them for years with back-ups and strategies all ready to be put in place. No plan ever goes exactly as it should but we gotta think big. Why bother with a high school diploma at all if you haven't learned enough by then to do anything but take a test?
This era of good enough for now needs to end. We need an era of good enough for all. We need people interested more in new ideas and inventions than facebook. We need people more interested in reading than tanning. We need people at the top that care about the people at the bottom. In America, we need a dream that's worth workin' and livin' for, maybe even one that nobody'll ever have to die for.
Things ain't the same as they used to be. More and more people are without work. The ones that have work to do are gettin' their hours or their pay cut. Whatever happened to one person bein' able to get a quality education through high school so he could get a job, work 40 hours and have enough to live on? Somebody squeezed all the independent thought they could out of the American people to create this bastardized version of the American dream.
Used to be if you worked hard you could be anything you wanted. Now, it seems no matter how much you work you won't ever have enough. There's no limit to what you have to do and you gotta do it all all alone until you work yourself to death. You need a need a high school diploma, need a bachelor's, need a master's, need loans, need a good job, so does your spouse, need 2 cars, need a big house, need some credit cards, need insurance, need better clothes, need nicer things, need to quit bein' lazy, need to quit complainin'. All you want is to live.
It's a hard life right now and pointin' fingers won't help. It's not just Obama, it's not just Bush, it's not just Clinton, there were bad decisions made for the last fifty years or more that put us in this corner. It's gonna take fifty years of good decisions to get us out. Good leaders don't make plans for a day they make them for years with back-ups and strategies all ready to be put in place. No plan ever goes exactly as it should but we gotta think big. Why bother with a high school diploma at all if you haven't learned enough by then to do anything but take a test?
This era of good enough for now needs to end. We need an era of good enough for all. We need people interested more in new ideas and inventions than facebook. We need people more interested in reading than tanning. We need people at the top that care about the people at the bottom. In America, we need a dream that's worth workin' and livin' for, maybe even one that nobody'll ever have to die for.
