The Enemy I Know...

I don't have a problem with drugs or alcohol.
I have a problem with self worth and that causes me to look for an escape from myself in any fashion.
I think I've always been a failure...
When I was younger, my parents struggled with each other, they couldn't figure out how to "make it work" and eventually, they discovered themselves in a messy break up.
Back then, the label "child of a broken home" was popular and I wonder if today, there are any children from "together" homes you know.
I found myself embracing that label because it was easier to belong to that, than fight to hold my life together.  I couldn't save my parents marriage, I couldn't explain what was happening to my little sister and brother.
I slowly slid backwards into a dark place because I felt there was nowhere else I could go.

My first real relationship with a woman failed.  I neglected her as my father did my mother.
My first job was monotonous and boring so I quit.
I crashed my first car and injured my girlfriend at the time, the memory still a stain on my internal sense of value.
I tried really hard not to procreate because I knew I would not be a good parent but apparently, I failed there too.  Not so much in the parenting because I try my hardest every day, but in the producing a life I was to be a role model for, yep, I fail.
I live in a part of the United States where we have outgrown our economy.  The lawmakers that came before me, fed their greed with bad decisions and now all our jobs are "gone".
If you are not familiar with Grand Rapids Michigan, I can tell you that we used to have two booming industries.  The auto production in Detroit and the furniture makers all over western Michigan.
In the past couple of decades, the furniture makers have all been replaced by plastic composite materials made by robots, in foreign countries.  The auto industry grew lazy and our own people began buying foreign cars.

I try to look for work everyday, I get an occasional interview where I seem to be well liked, I'm qualified for the job and I have loads of experience.
But I'm almost forty years old and they tell me they have hundreds of applicants and probs dozens that are just as good as me.  It's a roll of the dice as to who gets that prized job and I'm just not lucky I spose.
Or, if you had a choice between hiring a forty year old guy or a young, straight from college kid with most of his teeth, who would you hire..?

In the past few years, we have had an increasing problem with shootings all over our country.
People walk into schools loaded with guns, they hold hostages and murder as many as they can before shooting themselves in the mouth.  They walk into crowded movie theaters and "open fire" on women and children.
They seem to only want to hurt others and the attention they get from this is clearly what they're not getting in healthier ways.

Our president and politicians are pressing for better "gun control" as if that will keep weapons out of the hands of us "damaged humans".
But they don't seem to realize that we are just as dangerous without guns.
In other parts of the world, people are being killed by the thousands and no one cares about them just as our parents didn't seem to care about us.
Can we really keep blaming an inanimate object for our problems?
Are we so resistant to taking the blame with our own hands, that we have to accuse something without a mind of it's own..?

I don't think I want to hurt anybody.  My role has always been the one to slowly fade away unnoticed.
But I can fully understand why others want to hurt, why they want to be noticed even if it's for all the wrong reasons.
It's too bad we can't make a law to enforce more caring.