[spazmatastic]

guys, if you are on this message board, you don't know what its like to be that kid - white, black, hispanic, asian....

I ENTIRELY DISAGREE with this sentence!
I didn't have a nice and cozy life as a teen either and it was even worse at times when I went out on my own. I am only on Beckett now b/c I fought through it all and managed to get a job with a company that sees how reliable and important I am to their everyday functions AND b/c I have some family that helped me get to that better place and stay there. I am the oldest of three and as a teenager, I had to take care of my sister and brother b/c my Mom and stepdad were always working just to pay the bills. I still ended up dealing/doing drugs just to have fun and to have some extra cash to do the normal high school things, like going to a HS football game or dance or taking a girl out on a date. I am a white male AND I had friends of other races/sexes that had it better than me.
I stuck with it and graduated HS just b/c I didn't want to disappoint my extended family (even though they wouldn't have been surprised if I didn't graduate)! Even though my sister and brother didn't graduate HS (they didn't drop out, just not enough credits to get the diploma), I inspired them enough afterwards that they strived to do better. My sister has now been in the Navy for over 6 years and is pretty high up in the Navy as a weather forecaster. My brother is a trucker, something I would never attempt to do mostly b/c of the severe difficulty of manuevering such a large vehicle in a major city.
Back to my struggles, I got married at 19 (not b/c of a pregnancy or anything like that) but apparently out of stupidity. We split after about 2 years and I moved into the worst dump of a trailer park I've ever seen. Even with a job AND selling a 1/2 oz. to 1 oz. of weed per week on the side, I couldn't afford to stay there for much more than a year. I ended up homeless and stealing food from gas stations to feed myself. I managed to get my real Dad's parents to take me in for a few months until I got the job I have now. BTW, my ex-wife's parents are quite wealthy and helped us out a lot, but she still ended up in worse situations than I did.
I'm just saying that circumstances can make ANYONE do ANYTHING that they feel they need to do to survive. I never thought I would have to steal food from a gas station to keep from starving. The police let me go free after hauling me in to the PD, but I still had to deal with the charges. I dealt with that and did complete what the judge ordered me to do, but I shouldn't have been in that situation in the 1st place.