Our Homegrown Third World

I guess I live life from a unique perspective. I have known great wealth and have also experienced destitute poverty. My family is very wealthy, but by most standards I would be considered poor by my income.

I grew up in your typical upper middle class family. I and my siblings had opportunities that most children never get in a lifetime. My brother and sister both went on to become successful physicians of internal medicine. I tuned out to be this simple man who likes to read and write, and who works quietly in his father’s business in a modest position.

When I was in college the first time, my father bought me a brand new car, a nice apartment, paid my tuition, and gave me two credit cards; one for gas and one for expenses. I lived the charmed life, but there was a dark cloud on the horizon called schizophrenia.

My disease hit with full force in my early twenties, just as the best opportunities were being afforded me. It filled me with fear, apathy, and complacency. Life became a nightmare of delusions and paranoia. I could no longer go to college and I struggled for years with keeping a job

I finally ended up a broken and beaten man just out of a failed marriage and homeless; scorned by my once loving family. My disease had robbed me of everything in my life I had held so dear. All my opportunities had long since gone and had disappeared; pulled out of the grasps of my hands by this devastating disease that I had inherited, but didn’t ask for.

I had thought that my life was over. I spent six months out in the woods in the cold drinking tepid beer everyday and smoking copious amounts of cigarettes. These were my last comforts; my last tenuous holds on sanity. It was a slow crash and took about ten years, but I had finally hit bottom. I lived in the kind of poverty and destitution that you would think would only occur in Third World Nations. Not America, the land of the brave and the free; a nation where millions of poor people flooded in through Ellis Island as immigrants at the turn of the century lured by opportunity and new lives.

Normally, I stay away from main stream media, but I have been reading and catching glimpses of something amazing happening through other blogs. There seems to be this momentum going in the main stream press where the poverty and the “Third Worlds” of our great nation is being talked about and exposed. Katrina was just the catalyst.

I read the proceeding article and have read many others like it lately. Will this catalyst that caused so much damage and destruction bring about some good and change in our modern world? I do hope so. So many people could and can be helped if this momentum I am noticing continues to spread and grow.