Defending my Family

In light of the recent election, there has been lots of talk about taxes. I recently had a very short conversation with a friend about taxes and the fact that she is a fiscal conservative (which I am definitely not). I was fine until she got to the reason why she is a fiscal conservative. She started to talk about her parents and how much money they had (a lot) and one thought kept running through my head, "Don't say it. Don't say it." ...And then she said it.

"It's just that I see how hard my parents worked for what they have and got themselves into a lot of debt for it. If you make a good amount of money, you worked hard for it and you should get to keep it."

Up until this point in my life I may have said that my blood has boiled, but today I actually felt it. I literally felt little bubbles form in my blood and fizz their way violently through my arms, making their way into my chest, where they made my heart skip beats and shove said bubbles farther upward into my brain, turning my ears hot and likely causing an aneurysm.

I wanted to be sure before I let myself have a stroke, so I told her that lots of people work hard for their money and still don't earn as much. Plenty don't have the credit to get themselves into debt for a higher education. To which she replied generally that people who earn more worked harder.

*stroke*

This person was having an innocent conversation with a friend but I know there are plenty of people out there who believe that if you work hard, you make lots of money. Therefore, if you earn less it means you're lazy. I tried to tell my friend that my parents worked plenty hard for their money, but it was plainly visible from the glazed look in her eyes that she still thought her parents probably worked harder than mine did for what they've got.

My father studied to be a history professor at the University of Puerto Rico. Yes, he got a degree. Probably the first in his family to get one. Right after he got his bachelors, he got drafted to serve in Vietnam. He developed PTSD in that war. He saw friends die in front of him. After that, he was never the same. He couldn't hold a job. He ended up going into mechanics. He fixed cars for a company for a while here in the states and brought our family over. He was soon laid off from his auto mechanic job due to a bad economy. He spent the next few decades trying to get the compensation he rightly deserved from the government. The government was, and still is, denying so many Vietnam veterans the medical and psychological care they earned fighting for this country. He didn't finally get full support from the VA until I, his youngest child, had already left for college. By that time, he was almost 60. Was it lazy of him not to go back to school to be an engineer, doctor, lawyer, or other highly paid professional? He didn't work hard enough, right? He should've gotten off his lazy butt and tried to transfer UPR credits here (which is ridiculously impossible even though PR is a territory) and gone back for a PhD in something that makes you rich, because those are the only ones that prove you worked for a living. His PTSD and the time spent fighting the government wouldn't interfere with an expensive, long education, right? What about my mom? The licenses she trained for in PR don't work here. They ended up lapsing as she struggled to raise 3 kids with a sporadic dad with PTSD, which no one understood at the time, in a country where she didn't speak the native language. She obviously didn't work as hard as others since she didn't find some magic money to stick us in day care as my dad struggled with unemployment (among other demons), and get herself to some English classes, then some training she had already gone through so she could work here and, what, leave us at home alone all day? We had no family here for the first few years. My family didn't have furniture for our first year living in the continental US. I didn't learn to walk until we went to visit one of my father's friends and I suddenly started using the furniture to hop around. My mother had to watch me learn to walk in a stranger's home. Was it a tough situation or was it because my parents were too lazy to get some couches?

Look, we don't all have the same cookie cutter background where everything is possible. The truth exists that some people have to work harder to reach the same level of prosperity.

I didn't tell my extremely personal story here for pity or attention. It's just the story I know, and there are plenty of other people's stories out there, each one completely unique. Just because your family grew up relatively well off and went through some tough schooling and got lots of credit cards doesn't mean they worked harder than those who have to struggle to just buy groceries. It means they took more exams. I'm not saying they don't work hard, but you need to define what kind of work you mean and be really damn specific before you go around saying poor people obviously don't work as hard as the CEOs of the world.

And what about me? I was lucky enough to earn a full scholarship and silly enough to go to school for something I loved, instead of something that would just get me lots of money so i could own 2 houses and a boat. Does that make me lazy, or just idealistic? I love my parents for all their hard work to give me even the chance at a better, easier life. All 3 of their kids got degrees. And, you know what? I'm happy making peanuts, because I am still living more comfortably than my parents did, than we did, 20 years ago. They're the hardest working people I have ever known.