Great. Now do it with a criminal record, outstanding warrants, a mountain of debt, no high-school diploma, no life skills, the ingrained belief that the only people you can trust are people who look like you, and the danger of everyone you know and love hating you for your success--or worse, following you to wherever you succeed and descending on you like a plague of locusts.
And that's not even black ghetto-prisoners I'm talking about; that's white trailer-trash I've known throughout my life.
It's not that easy, especially in a world where your entire life follows you now. Used to, yeah, you could just vanish and start over, but now? Everything is permanent, nothing is forgotten; it's illegal to try to put the past behind, in some respects.
You talk lightly about just renting a place, but they're not renting a place and getting a job; they're rebuilding their reality. They're escaping lifetime systemic abuse. They're putting away everything they've ever known and starting over in a foreign place surrounded by strangers and learning from nothing, possibly without even an education to help them. With no money.
I don't like it and I do agree that people ought to strive for better (because better is what we're supposed to be), but ignoring these factors doesn't help matters.
Thanks you for a little better explanation. I don't agree with the everything, but I hadn't looked at it as trying to escape a lifetime of abuse, with the same problems as if you're trying to escape a domestic abuse partner.
And the one thing I hadn't considered: Fear of the unknown.
Better the devil you know, I guess.
Edit: The domestic abuse angle makes a lot of sense. Growing up your whole life hearing how the only people who care about you are Democrats, that you're lucky that the Democrats love you or you'd have it even worse, hearing nothing but how outside your zone is Republicans who will hang you or otherwise brutalize you if it wasn't for Daddy Democrat watching over you, I can understand it a little better.
They'd be giving up the protection of the Democratic government. I don't look down on anyone for Food Stamps, Sect-8, TANF, I get it that sometimes you're at rock bottom and need help making till you can get a job. And if that's all you've known then the idea of taking control of your own destiny, even if you sat down and went over the pros and cons and how you could do it and what would stop you, would seem like a Herculean task.
And the fact that people won't let you move beyond your past any more is just fucking wrong. Vanishing and starting over requires effort now. That having done time in prison isn't "They paid their debt to society" any more and more "a leapord can't change its spots" eternal punishment.
I'd never looked at from that angle. I'd always looked at it as "It's scary, it's risky, but I ain't living here no more".
Thanks for the explanation.
Then leave your shithole of Oregon using your same methods dude.
Then come back to us to see how it worked out.
It fucking worked great. Thanks for the couple months late advice.
The fact it had turned into a shithole, where I had no power to change anything because the people with the power wanted it to REMAIN a shithole, and I ended up disenfranchised, living somewhere where it rained ash for 30 days and 30 nights, the water had gone bad, the bills and taxes were rising for no return, and the homeless from CA were making it dangerous just to go to the grocery store.
So I left. I packed up everything that fit in the truck, sold/gave away/threw away the rest, tossed the family in the truck, and left.
It's worked great.
Just like when the mill shut down and I left 15 years before with nothing more than what I could fit in a fucking hatchback.
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