There is a community that to this very day remains beyond the reach of aid, in the periphery that lies outside the blinders of both governmental and nongovernmental organizations. A place where thousands live frantic and stressful lives in a perpetual famine of time and resources, their needs marginalized and left unaddressed due to stereotypes, their lives spent frantically striving simply to meet their perceived basic material needs with limited time to spend with their families or on the simple pleasures in life, forced by their environment to live in a perpetual state of debt, resiliently putting on a smile despite, day after day, waking to face a world that will never be capable of meeting these needs. A place of alienation and shame, neighbors living isolated in fear of judgment for their relatively low standard of living. A place where stressed wracked parents frequently erupt into violence at children’s sporting events. A place where families are torn apart as breadwinners are forced to commute long distances as the local economy is unable to provide a living wage. A place where children and adults frequently resort to drugs to escape their reality. A place where suicides are swept under the Oriental rug, dismissed as just another case of ‘autoerotic asphyxiation.’ A place where the majority sees the need to drink bottled water out of fear of drinking from the tap. A place incapable of locally meeting its own food demands. In Lake Forest, Illinois the cries for help go muffled into down pillows or echoing through the dozens of rooms and furnished basements in each home.
Save the Poor Rich People will be there to listen and help carry these misconstrued miscreants into a brighter day. We will work to foster appreciation for the inevitably limited resources that one has. We will try and teach basic financial management courses to enable families to live sustainable and meaningful lives within their economic means. We will provide economic opportunities for children, so that they are no longer offered the limited choices offered to their parents’ generation: lawyer, doctor, businessman, financier, robber baron. We will provide other avenues for self-actualization and try to fight against a culture that turns to drugs, prescription or otherwise, as a solution to legitimate psychological issues developing out of an unhealthy environment. We will try and repair broken homes, to bring families back to the dinner table.
I feel the gravity of my home calling me back, my 28 year celestial cycle coming full circle, calling me to stop escaping the poverty of my homeland by gallivanting around Latin America; to return and share what I have learned from other cultures regarding human development and quality of life.
Let’s go America, we have work to do! The top 1% has not grown as a percentage of the population in decades. Email me for funding opportunities to improve the world from the top down!