Hopefully by the time this post is published, everything contained herein is no longer an issue. However, my confidence is low on that. 

The early portion of my life was interesting and often shocking to people when they hear the details of it. For reasons that I assume now were purely due to mismanagement of funds, when it was just my mother, brother, and I; we experienced days in which we ate rice or oatmeal for breakfast and dinner, lunch wasn’t always a thing unless we were in school. As students, we qualified for free lunch which sometimes seemed like punishment. They’d serve these toasted peanut butter and jelly sandwiches sometimes that were awful, but filling. We went through periods when the utilities were cut off in the places we lived, and we relied on the kindness of our neighbors to sustain harsh conditions at times. Not having much, sometimes having less than the basic necessities is what causes me to say I grew up poor when reflecting on my life. Things changed drastically when I moved in with my father, but even he didn’t know the full extent of what was going on before then.

What are we doing here?

All that to say, being poor sucked ass in retrospect. In real time, we were basically keeping up with the Jones’ in our neighborhood. I have a soft spot for struggle, as well as an eye out for when it is mismanagement versus being a victim of the condition of poverty. At the end of the day, kids can’t distinguish between the two when it is happening to them. I won’t say that it doesn’t matter, but “why” someone is poor isn’t of the utmost importance to me. How they are treated and what assistance is available to remedy them of poverty truly and effectively is important. Only recently have I considered what our government has done with our money in place of helping those that need it most at home. I understand there are political reasons for helping other places, but there’s minimal value in it really when your own home starts to decay, in my opinion at least.

What y’all doing with my money?

Since I was born, the U.S. has given hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign aid, with military and security having the highest percentage on average over those years. Our aid to Israel has been somewhere in the ballpark of $158B alone since they were made into a country, not including our military hanging out near them playing big brother to protect them. As I watch Israel decimate Palestinians in what is clearly an act of genocide, I imagine how that money could have been better used at home, because those assholes don’t deserve a single quarter in my opinion. With this proposed $14B package that is currently on the table, every public-school teacher in the country could receive a federal bonus of $3600 instead of sending it to slaughter innocents. Averaged out over the years, it comes up to a little over $2B per year since 1948. So even though the number has fluctuated and drastically increased in the last 40 years, our domestic landscape would be a lot better had we used it to maintain or prop up the places that need it most at home instead of creating this monster of a society which is Israel.

We like monsters

Don’t get me wrong, we’ve given money to several other monsters in this period of time as well, but I don’t recall any others actively carrying out genocide while receiving foreign aid. It is not lost on me that the instability in South and Central America, along with the Middle East in recent decades is largely due to U.S. policies in these regions. The inability to see others that are not of European descent as equals, seems to be the ruling foreign policy. As a result, we’ve created monsters directly and indirectly in each one of these areas, only to pay a lot of money helping them maintain power, or to ultimately overthrow them as was the case with Saddam Hussein and Manuel Noriega. Add every Israeli PM to that list! Our assistance to Israel is no different in my opinion, except Israel was established by Europeans, so there is likely to be no “correction” to the previous stance. 

To be clear, I have no issue with Jews or Judaism at all…I wholeheartedly disagree with Zionism. In my opinion, no one has rights to any land or territory based on what is written in their religious texts. In the case of Zionists who believe the area known as Israel is theirs because it is so stated in the Old Testament or Torah, it’s a very simple argument to me. Those books (tales) were written by and for Jews, which means there is bias involved. That bias is rooted in a belief of religious superiority, which means the views and ways of others are deemed as secondary at best to their own views. So if their religion says they are the rightful owners to something, everyone else be damned, and I don’t believe a word of that shit…should I be forced to adhere to their claims? Absolutely not, and neither the Brits nor the U.S. governments would allow that in their territories either. However, we it is allowed elsewhere, and becomes their problem…until tragedies such as 9/11 and the USS Cole tragedy and so on. 

My line in the sand!