Being Home...

When I finally pulled in to my driveway Wednesday evening, I was incredibly happy to be home. But now that I have been home for a couple days, I can feel my soul starting to wither away.

Last night at dinner, my mom and dad were talking about how all of the people who are on the various state funded systems abuse the system.  They completely refuse to acknowledge the reasons behind why people need to abuse the systems, and that only about ten percent of people abuse the system, it just happens that we only hear about that ten percent of the population -- for example, a man in who lives in one of the Carolinas, sent California a check to repay the state the money that he received in unemployment benefits, plus interest.  When I told my Dad this, the first thing that he assumed is that the man somehow got caught cheating the system. Yet there was nothing about him in my local paper, even though it happened the same day that these other people were caught.


They also do not look at the culture of the United States.  They don't realize that we live in a culture that promotes laziness, and exploitation. Look at our foreign policy, where we send our jobs overseas to exploit foreign labor sources, simply because we do not want to pay any more than we have to for a given product.  But when I explain this to my family, I am clearly the person who knows nothing, even though I spend my days studying how society impacts people. 

My entire family is also against the DREAM act, because they  hate illegal immigrants because they apparently take our jobs (even though the jobs that these immigrants work are ones that no one in my  family would ever even consider working, aka working in the fields for 14 hours a day, or working in US sweatshops), and they also hate them because they do not pay taxes.  But this act would allow minors who came to this country illegally to be citizens after the fulfill certain requirements, such as graduating high school, and then graduating from a 4 year university, or serving two years in the armed forces (although I wholly disagree that the armed forces should be part of the requirement for them to become citizens, because we do not need to exploit anymore innocent people to join our war machine), the fact that these people would be given a chance to attend college, and make their lives better and pull themselves up by the bootstraps, become American citizens, is an excellent idea, because then they will be taxpaying citizens (something I thought would make my parents happy) and besides that, the pulling yourself up by the bootstraps idea is totally the American Dream (even though I know that it totally does not exist in the US, people generally do not change classes here, only enough people make it so that people actually think that the American Dream does still exist). 

Needless to say,
it is going to be a long month here at home.