Merika
I am seriously handicapped and hoped to make a living as a freelancer or blogger. I have a strong academic background and thought I would be smart enough and I've never been able to make it work.
I was STAR Student of my graduating high school class. That means I had the highest SAT score (a college entrance exam) and was in the top ten percent of GPA.
I was inducted into a college level math honor society in eleventh grade, the earliest they would take you. I won a National Merit Scholarship to a prestigious world class university. I was state alternate for the Governor's Honors Program, a gifted residential summer program.
That means two people in the entire state did better than me for a particular subject and if one had been unable to participate, I would have taken their place. My recollection is I was fifteen and the two people who beat me out were older than me, so it's possible that I was alternate solely because I was young enough to potentially apply again and they may have had a policy of taking older students if at all reasonable.
There's NO evidence whatsoever that any of my ideas have any value at all. All evidence suggests that I'm wasting my time with this bullshit. It's not a business model. It's never going to be a business model. It accomplishes nothing other than keeping me harmlessly occupied while trying to endure my endless health issues.
I LIKE certain topics. I've started countless blogs and Reddits on endless variations of my interest in community development work. r/urbanforestry is the ONLY one that is SLIGHTLY successful.
Absolutely everything else I have done and continue to do is a complete and total debacle that has made me persona non grata across the Internet.
That's not me whining. I know people will read that and think that.
My earliest exposure to Internet forums was via TAGMAX, part of tagfam.org, the oldest gifted community on the Internet. Based on long experience with a lot of very smart and educated people working on this stuff, they had developed two standards:
1. Speak from firsthand experience.
2. Or cite your sources.
I took that to heart as a best practice and I frequently speak from firsthand experience to try to explain something and it mostly gets me accused of being a narcissist or gets me a pity party from people who apparently want to believe I have a personal problem and it couldn't possibly be a systemic issue, no.
At the age of sixty, I am becoming inclined to think that if I can't make this work with my background, it simply doesn't work.
And maybe it doesn't work because the USA is fundamentally broken and has been since conception, like a human with a deadly genetic disorder because something in its DNA is miscoded.
The Haudenosaunee Confederation is described as a still living democracy and the Wikipedia article documents that some historians suggest the founding fathers of the US borrowed ideas from it. I actually think that makes more sense than the standard narrative that these were unique incredible idealistic geniuses who just birthed a new concept of government whole cloth.
If you are Native and reading this, your takeaway should be that Doreen Traylor, whatever her Blood Quantum or ethnicity, attributes a significant portion of her recovery to Native influence on her life.
My life is too broken to ever fix. It's not ever going to work and that's not because I'm stupid or lazy or otherwise somehow personally deficient.
I don't typically harp on this though I have said it before, but I sincerely believe that if it weren't for me and my writing, Donald Trump would have broken this country up into multiple smaller countries during his first presidency.
If he finally successfully destroys it this time around which he seems to be intentionally TRYING to do, perhaps the peoples whose ideas were stolen and botched by White assholes from Europe can pick up the pieces and create something better than Merika, Land of the Sleeze, Home of the Depraved.
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