Radio Email 1

I live in Roxboro, North Carolina. I have an average poor family. We had plenty of situations when we were out of food stamps, so we had bologna and treet meat (couldn't afford the spam) for the day and you couldn't get both if you got an extra loaf of bread. My mother didn't finish high school and my father (who had cancer and died of a brain injury)  never finished elemtary school and couldnt read or write. My sisters and I were always told that our education will lead to great things. When I graduated high school my family didnt have the money to buy college applications let alone send me to a four year university. The best and cheapest choice was to do two years at a community college and transfer once I could afford to.

I qualified for the Pell grant and I was doing very well my first two years at the local community college and even got a job as a peer tutor mentor (I got a reward for it last year) which counted as class credit but I couldn't make more than $400 a month. Our town had a few new factories that were hiring, and a lot of small businesses had started at this time.  It was all fine for a while, but one day the largest factory in the town shut down. It sent a huge ripple effect of downturn through this town.

A few weeks later another factory closed and a dozen more small business got shut down. The price of gas sky rocketed and the number of people you saw using a food stamps card (the one with the American flag as the cover) at the grocery store was going up. The economy had started to die and with it my way of life. My mom lost her job since there weren't people coming in to shop, my step dad had to change jobs to save money on the three dollar gas, my sister lost her job since people didn't have money to waste on photos, and  the majority of the students I tutored we're unemployed factory workers who hadn't used a textbook in over 30 years. When I point out talked about it to my friends, who WERE republican, they said I was just whining because I was poor anyway. The very same people who told me that Bush should be elected again  to follow up in Iraq and didnt vote for Obama because he was black (Im black and since this is the south the white people don't care about open racism that much =/  )

I was spending every paycheck on a bill and hardly making ends meet. I didn't have a lot of money left after each pay check so I had to resort to credit cards. I got one with a $500 limit, and even though I never spent over $475, I always had a half dozen hidden fees that seemed to take me about a dollar over the limit and cost $40 to repay. Then I got sick and went to the hospital TWICE for 5 or 6 hours. That pretty much bankrupted me. I was charged almost $11,000 for x-rays and tests.

What was left of the the local jobs that I was interested in dried up so I (and hundreds of other) college students we're told to go back to school and learn about new forms of technology, medical professions, and business. So I did. We all did.

Now we are being told that they are not only gutting Pell grant funds but they are making it even harder to receive the grant. The only option will be to get a bank loan which will be almost impossible to pay off.

So here I sit, 24 years old, living at home with my mom, stepdad, step sister (22), little sister (21) and her two kids, no job, no cash. My older sister got lucky and married a well off chemist/scientist for some company. Now that almost all of our bills are behind the only things ill have soon is my debt and a hell of a lot of credit hours that cant be put to use here. Wed have to sell all of our things just to move to another place.

A lot of the pople I know are in the same situation, and they are starting to come around and see what is happening and why. I think a lot of the college students around the country are as well. We worked so hard in k-12 then college to do what was best for ourselves and our families. Now everyone wants us to be smart, but not from a public education and only from a private college. They want us to have good careers as long as we aren't paid through the government or want a pension.  We can be great patriotic soldiers in their military, as long as we don't get hurt and expect some sort of disability check. Don't forget we need to die really fast once we get a serious illness so we all don't have hospital bills like mine.

What the older generation fails to realize is that the young voters that got Obama elected, voted to get CHANGE elected. Im sure some people voted because he was black. Im sure some voted just because he was a democrat.  But we all voted because we believed in his message. The young people of this country are no longer going to be tools for these politicians. No matter which side they are on.

WE WANT THE CHANGE AND OPPORTUNITY WE ALL WORKED FOR.