stability
05-11-2005, 07:18 PM
I think it is easy for people to stress out over money. Money controls lots of things in this country and world, it can become what people live for if they are not careful. You will see in this story how a person born into poverty feels the pressure of money and gets past it.
It is new year’s eve of 1979, the loud screams from party’s across town make you feel like your in Las Vegas during a power outage. There are never big lights in this city though, with a residence of just ten-thousand people, Capital city doesn’t live up to its name. A young waitress scurrying around the local bar serving drinks looks as though she has worked for the last 3 days straight. She is constantly running around serving the drunks that swallow the drinks brought to them as if it were they’re last. As she heads to the back, a child peeks his head out through the door. “Josh get back in there” Wendy yells. “But mom I want to go to bed, all I ever get to do is sit here at work with you” says Josh.
Six years later it is the same story. It is 1985 now, Josh is in middle-school and his mother is never home for him because she gets paid minimal amounts to do her job. Everyday Josh gets up and goes to school early, this is his escape from his home world. At school he’s in a world where he doesn’t have to worry about whether he will get to eat or not. Josh already thinks like a wise old man, he witnesses first hand how poverty is ruining his mothers life and how it is coming after him soon. After school each day he walks with his friends a short distance until they split in opposite directions to go home. This is always Josh’s loneliest time of the day, as he heads home to a house that so closely resembles a abandoned shack.
It‘s 6:30 a.m., the alarm clock is obnoxiously buzzing . Josh is getting up for school, but today is different, today is the first day of high school. Fairlane High School is a rough school on the poor end of town. The halls are packed in this overcrowded school making hardly enough room for students to open their lockers which are drenched in rust and dented profusely. Josh and his friends show up late today, and walk in to their first period English class together. Something is different though, Josh and his friends are wearing expensive clothes they never had before. Once class ends they all head out into the hall and people start coming up to them slipping them money, they give Ziploc bags in return. Josh finally figured out a way to eat and have money like most kids his age. The hard drugs were something he didn’t use though, Josh was straight business and didn‘t stray from that. Everyone started hanging around him now that he had a nice car and money, but Josh had changed. Now he didn’t care that the people who weren’t his friend when he was poor, wanted to be around him now that he had money.
As time went on he progressed rapidly through the drug business, making more cash than all his neighbors. He had moved out at 15 years of age and was on his own. He soon dropped out of high school but had planned to get his G.E.D. After he dropped out of high school he realized that he felt really empty inside, he had sold his personality short working for money. It wasn’t dropping out of high school that made him feel empty, it was the fact that he spent all these years working to get something that in the end didn’t make him feel the way he had thought it would. Having money didn’t make him happy, just the powerful burden of needing it made him unhappy. At nineteen years old, with enough money to last the rest of his life, he wasn’t happy without pumping drugs into his veins every day to deal with his deep and dark depression.
The dark hole that he felt burrowed inside overcame him and eventually Josh died from an overdose at age 31, his heart beat out of control and popped inside his chest. His mother didn’t even know how her son had felt about the poverty stricken life they had shared. She didn’t get to know Josh for who he was, because Josh was so busy evading poverty. As the stretcher was wheeled out, Wendy felt she had died on that awful day as well.
It is new year’s eve of 1979, the loud screams from party’s across town make you feel like your in Las Vegas during a power outage. There are never big lights in this city though, with a residence of just ten-thousand people, Capital city doesn’t live up to its name. A young waitress scurrying around the local bar serving drinks looks as though she has worked for the last 3 days straight. She is constantly running around serving the drunks that swallow the drinks brought to them as if it were they’re last. As she heads to the back, a child peeks his head out through the door. “Josh get back in there” Wendy yells. “But mom I want to go to bed, all I ever get to do is sit here at work with you” says Josh.
Six years later it is the same story. It is 1985 now, Josh is in middle-school and his mother is never home for him because she gets paid minimal amounts to do her job. Everyday Josh gets up and goes to school early, this is his escape from his home world. At school he’s in a world where he doesn’t have to worry about whether he will get to eat or not. Josh already thinks like a wise old man, he witnesses first hand how poverty is ruining his mothers life and how it is coming after him soon. After school each day he walks with his friends a short distance until they split in opposite directions to go home. This is always Josh’s loneliest time of the day, as he heads home to a house that so closely resembles a abandoned shack.
It‘s 6:30 a.m., the alarm clock is obnoxiously buzzing . Josh is getting up for school, but today is different, today is the first day of high school. Fairlane High School is a rough school on the poor end of town. The halls are packed in this overcrowded school making hardly enough room for students to open their lockers which are drenched in rust and dented profusely. Josh and his friends show up late today, and walk in to their first period English class together. Something is different though, Josh and his friends are wearing expensive clothes they never had before. Once class ends they all head out into the hall and people start coming up to them slipping them money, they give Ziploc bags in return. Josh finally figured out a way to eat and have money like most kids his age. The hard drugs were something he didn’t use though, Josh was straight business and didn‘t stray from that. Everyone started hanging around him now that he had a nice car and money, but Josh had changed. Now he didn’t care that the people who weren’t his friend when he was poor, wanted to be around him now that he had money.
As time went on he progressed rapidly through the drug business, making more cash than all his neighbors. He had moved out at 15 years of age and was on his own. He soon dropped out of high school but had planned to get his G.E.D. After he dropped out of high school he realized that he felt really empty inside, he had sold his personality short working for money. It wasn’t dropping out of high school that made him feel empty, it was the fact that he spent all these years working to get something that in the end didn’t make him feel the way he had thought it would. Having money didn’t make him happy, just the powerful burden of needing it made him unhappy. At nineteen years old, with enough money to last the rest of his life, he wasn’t happy without pumping drugs into his veins every day to deal with his deep and dark depression.
The dark hole that he felt burrowed inside overcame him and eventually Josh died from an overdose at age 31, his heart beat out of control and popped inside his chest. His mother didn’t even know how her son had felt about the poverty stricken life they had shared. She didn’t get to know Josh for who he was, because Josh was so busy evading poverty. As the stretcher was wheeled out, Wendy felt she had died on that awful day as well.