The Below Class

America. Land of the free home of the brave and fosterer of the below class. If this article makes you uncomfortable it should. Children all over the country are living a life with no hope for a future. Given this involuntarily at birth. I have had the blessing to grow up as one of these dirty haired, mud caked kids that the other parents did not want their children to play with. However, unfortunate this maybe I am thankful every day for the ability it has given me to see life from the bottom up and the top down.

Society wants to blame the poor man, but what about the poor child? The child that grows up to be the poor man cluelessly injected into a system that continues to fail Americas below class youth at every turn. A system that is only there to be present and not actually work. A system to provide a false since of safety in the minds of middle and upper-class citizens to fall back on when they see the homeless man sleeping in a cardboard box, or the drug addict selling herself for her next fix. A social class that exists largely due to luck of the draw and the stacking of the deck at birth. Leaving the privileged born clueless as to their great fortune, the many great opportunities they will have that the poor will not. The endlessness of what money can buy them. Private everything from schools to tutors and nannies all the way to grades and college acceptance letters. A childhood that some of you know and that others cannot even fathom.

I want you to reach inside of yourself and put on these shoes, they are used shoes, tennis shoes that barley cover your feet; they are shoes and you have never had a better pair. In fact, you have only ever seen a nicer pair through a glass window of a store you are not welcome in, nor will you ever. In these tight, to small, hole filled uncomfortable shoes you are a fourteen-year-old kid that was born into poverty and despair. Parents on welfare with drugs and/or alcohol addiction from the day you were born. You are the child that was beaten and molested for as long as you can remember. A child whose sole purpose growing up was on that of survival and keeping siblings alive. A child that never was afforded the opportunity to focus on school, much less dream of attending a university in the future. No. School in your life is a burden. Interfering with self-imposed roles of mother and father, roles of working, cooking and sibling survival. Roles that don’t earn you a passing SAT score. You are this child. Empty and dissolute. You raise yourself trying to survive in a world where thriving is key. When your next meal to cook for your brothers and sisters is much more important than three chapters of homework due the next day. You just need to find another one more day, another twenty-four hours of living. YOU are this child and all you want is an abuse-less day after school to sleep. Your wishes and your aspirations were diluted by the time you reached grade school. Can you put these shoes on? Can you look at the dirty shoe torn child in their eyes and tell them that the very reason their life is this way is because they did not work hard enough, that they did not focus and apply themselves? The answer is yes.

Society tells this below class of children as they grow into adults every day that they are not good enough. That they did not work hard enough and that it is them who is at fault. A social class where the escape is nearly impossible, much less the thought of one. I, like many as me, are from this class, desperately trying to scratch and claw ourselves out of the odds. To walk around a school and society where you are looked down upon by teachers and authority figures from the very day you are born. A Below Class of Americas youth that fail to conform to a Country that does not want them. Life where the will and fight to survive trumps any hope of success. I childhood where the only future is yesterday. A childhood that I hope makes you uncomfortable.