skylinerj34

I was going to tell you my name but I don’t think it really matters and I don’t want people trying to find where I leave or where I work. But I will tell you I was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in 1971. I grew in a middle income household which comprised my grandfather, my grandmother, my aunt, my mother, me and my twin brother. I was raised by all the adults and some of my mother’s friends. That was until I moved to the house my mother built when I was 13 and my little sister came in the picture. I went to two all boy Catholic schools: Saint Jean L’evangeliste and Saint Louis de Gonzague. I graduated Secondary School in 1991 which would be equivalent to High School and one year of college. After a year of going from place to place, my mother enrolled me in the Interamerican University of Puerto Rico. I wish I could tell how brilliantly I performed there but that wasn’t the case. Looking at it now, I realized at that time I was going to a personal trauma that still hunts me today. I never finished; I married a woman whom I didn’t love and I had two children with her. My boy is fifteen and my girl thirteen and they live in Puerto Rico with their mom now.

To make a long story short, since I got married, I never found stability. I’ve had ten different jobs in four different industries. I’ve been in manufacturing, in retail, in the military and now I’m trying to see if I can make something happen in the Insurance industry. I’ve always been creative; I think I inherited it from my father: all the men in his side of the family either draw or paint. I’m pretty good myself but I haven’t picked up a brush, a chuck or pencil in so long. I don’t have the time or the luxury to do that but I do have the time and luxury to write. So when did I decide to start writing? I guess when I got angry. You know there’s something that made me feel uneasy when our government decided to invade Iraq. It just didn’t seem right. First, then Secretary Powell comes out and say that there were no concrete evidence there were weapons of mass destruction, then he goes to the UN and swears by God that there were. There seemed to be a tension, there seemed to be a push for it. I expressed these feelings to an officer in my platoon at the time and was I surprised when he expressed these same concerns. We started talking about it on and off and he lent me a DVD from Noam Chomsky and another one called Outfoxed. He also encouraged me to go see Fahrenheit 9/11 and read a book my General Smedley Buttler called War is a Racket. And my curiosity took over from there. I started to watch C-Span, read a couple of books by Randall Robison and a few other books both from the left and the right.

I believe when I got angry is when I saw Fahrenheit 9/11. After I saw that movie, I thought there was no way we would elect former president Bush again and we did. I got angrier: I couldn’t believe we could act as stupid as a nation. John Kerry was certainly a gaffe machine but we elected a man who ran every business he ever had into the ground. What did we expect him to do as president?  But he did make millions as he ran down these businesses. Well I guess I shouldn’t be surprised: we do give multi million dollar compensations to CEOs we fire for doing a bad job. In the meanwhile hard working people are earning less and less and working more hours just to get by. When did we become this nation? The answer is: when we started measuring people’s value by their net worth and not the content of their character. We still can save this nation but we need to change our vision; we need to reevaluate our values.