Trump and the Forgotten

The first job I’ve ever had was in 10th grade. It was at a place called Speednews in a building in Century City. I only went to work on Thursdays after-school and the job was incredibly boring and monotonous. The job consisted only of collating papers for four hours straight, and, if I was lucky, I got to talk to a friend. In my junior year of high school I quit the job because I felt like I was only using 0.0000001% of my potential and that felt terrible. Mind you, in that job I never used what I learned in school. I would have needed at most a 5th grade education to do all the paperwork. I was disappointed that all the knowledge I learned in school didn’t apply to the job in any way, shape or form.

Inauthentic Automation

Then in my junior year of high school I had this class called Workability. In this class you learn about the job market a little bit. I really enjoyed the teacher of the class and had a friendly relationship with her and she’s now a friend on Facebook. To be in the Workability class you needed a job and if you didn’t have one they would find you one. After I quit Speednews, I went to work as an intern for Mortgage USA and it was pretty boring. I was just shredding papers and asking the employees if computers needed an update. Last but not least in my senior year of high school, believe it or not, I worked for a company named US Mortgage through the same program. This job was more interesting but it was a pain in the neck because it was telemarketing and at first we manually dialed the numbers until we got an autodialer. At all of these jobs, I basically felt like a robot and I was hardly using any of my potential. (Not to mention that the school was late in paying me the money I was owed since I was indirectly paid by them.)

A Roll of the Dice

I graduated high school and decided to go to community college as I talked about in my first blog post. I knew that if a good job came by I’d want to get out of college ASAP and stick to the job because I wasn’t one for sitting behind a desk and having to do homework and taking tests. Little did I know the hell that was awaiting me in my journey. The Career Services Center at the college was surprisingly even less effective than the Workability program I had in high school. The thing that struck me most about the job market was that everything I was told in my mandatory formal education was basically a lie. We all need money to not end up poor but the job market is a GAMBLE! When I thought about that I was disgusted to my core. The one thing we need to survive and thrive is a numbers game?! Growing up, I was always told I’d end up in a place like McDonald’s if I got really bad grades or dropped out of high school. During my first year of community college I worked with the Career Center on and off but to no avail.

Economic Terrorism

My second year of college is when the unthinkable happens: My mom moves back to the bane of my existence a.k.a. the house in Bel Air. After that I move in with my father and live with him but the problem is I’m treated more like a roommate than a son. I still work with the Career Center albeit with a caveat because this is 2008 and I’m being told that the economy has “crashed” and I don’t even know what the hell that means! However, I sure as hell know I had absolutely nothing to do with it. In addition to that, I am basically being told by some people and members in my family that the B.A. is the new high school diploma. This to me was the epitome of unfairness. I kept wondering what the hell could my generation have done to deserve this. Some people in my generation don’t love college and academics and really want to see what it’s like to work. Why is it that older generations could’ve lived relatively comfortable, middle-class lives when all they had was a diploma but all of a sudden our society deems fit for my generation to get a college degree and even after that a good job is still a GAMBLE! Gone are the old rules of the game where a high school diploma means a sensible job you can live with and a degree means “you’ll make a million dollars more” so to speak.

It’s Gonna be a Bright, Bright...

Finally it’s my third year of Community College and I decide to take up broadcasting as a major for an A.A. degree. The good news is I finally find an elusive job but it’s federal work study and I work at the computer lab at my college. Even more fortunate was getting my manager, who is the friendliest person ever. We talk about life, jobs and my major. I really enjoyed the times we had together. The job at the computer lab was easy but never as boring as the jobs I had in the past because I could always talk to my manager for help and support. So it’s all good until…

Stormy Day

The unthinkable happens again and it seems like my dad’s new wife wants to move into a one bedroom apartment and I think I’m going to be evicted. I’m very disappointed because I finally find a job and I’m only 3 classes away from getting my AA and this crap keeps on happening. Long story short, I end up in Israel on a Kibbutz and it doesn’t go so well. I come back from Israel and I’m right back where it all started in Bel Air with my mom. At this point I feel FORGOTTEN, BETRAYED, AND ABANDONED. I ask myself where the hell my future went. I had hopes and dreams that were never realized. I’m laying in bed thinking it’s basically gone full circle. I’m back in Bel Air stuck without a car, without a job, and without a life!! A concoction of negative emotions were going through my brain putting me in a state of super depression. I didn’t want to move. I didn’t want to do anything. I just kept thinking about those three classes and how I was so close to getting that A.A. and no one, ESPECIALLY NOT OBAMA OR ANY OF HIS SUPPORTERS, gave a damn about me. It takes me some time to finally get out of this super depression. Thank G-d for my uncle who buys me a car so I can go back to college, take those three classes and finally get my AA degree. To my great dismay (even before going to Israel) the broadcasting professors were just really full of themselves (ego and pride) and never really helped me or told me what to do to find a job (except for one of them).

Out of the Wilderness

Thank heavens my mom decides to finally leave Bel Air and if I never see that house in Bel Air ever again it’ll be too soon. Amazingly and Ironically we move to Century City, the place where I held my first job. Then after applying to almost all the jobs at the Century City mall (again to no avail), I applied to the McDonald’s right across the street. For the bad rap that McDonald's gets, at least it wasn’t as boring as the jobs that I held when I was in high school. I still felt disappointed that an A.A. degree gets you a McDonald’s job but I was far happier than when I was in Bel Air. I’m also happy to say that now I finally have a B.A. degree and I’m working on my own projects.

Make Ariel Relevant Again

What does all this have to do with Trump you ask? From what I’ve seen and heard from him, so far it appears that Trump would have actually cared about what was happening to me at the point when I felt betrayed and abandoned by the system around me. The problem was that after all I learned in school to care about the environment, care about social justice, care about the animals in the forest, and care about climate change. Then when all of that was said and done the system DIDN’T CARE about me. However, I also think that some of the things Trump says and does are bad like when he joked about shooting someone and not losing supporters. I thought that was in very bad taste and it was disgraceful. Not to mention some of the things he says about women. However, all of that takes a back seat when I think about the suffering I went through when I felt abandoned and betrayed by the system that promised so much and delivered on so little.

Full Potential

Keep in mind that I’m not heartless as a lot of anti-Trump people think of Trump supporters. I think everyone deserves a chance. At the same time, I hope that Trump isn’t like Senator Armstrong from Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (look it up) who just want the strong to thrive and the weak to be purged. I remember when Raiden (the protagonist in the game) talked to him about what he knew about struggling to survive and what that meant. If Trump actually does think that we should leave the people who are struggling behind (and I doubt this) then I’ll be the first one to go against him as well. What I have seen so far is the opposite of that in my opinion. All I know for sure is that job hunting is one of the worst, most thankless jobs out there that doesn’t pay a penny but should. If anyone is doing anything to solve that problem he or she is a hero in my book. From what Trump says in his victory speech on election night is that he sees tremendous potential that is being squandered. This goes back to what I said in the beginning that the first job I had only used 0.0000001% of my potential. I want to be happy in a career that uses 90% to 100% of my potential and then I’ll be more than happy to talk about the environment and climate change. Until then I’ll just be disappointed.

What Would You Do?

What I want to do now is ask all you people who dislike Trump out there: What is your solution for the people who feel left behind by a society that’s changing at a rapid pace and that the job market has ignored and left behind? Are you going to tell them to think about climate change and using the proper pronouns when addressing someone's gender? What is your solution for the person who feels depressed and borderline suicidal when he or she feels like nobody's listening and no one cares about what they went through in life and where they ended up?

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