Growing Up In America

Growing Up in America

By J. Stephan Painter

Copyright 2012 J. Stephan Painter

Published at Smashwords

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Table of Contents

Who is J. Stephan Painter?

Synopsis

Chapter 1 – Why Listen To Me – The Prelude

Chapter 2 – Gregory Pappy Boyington

Chapter 3 – David Crockett

Chapter 4 – Sgt Alvin York

Chapter 5 – Andrew Johnson

Chapter 6 – Sam Houston

Chapter 7 – John Belushi

Chapter 8 – Ted Turner

Chapter 9 – Earl Campbell

Chapter 10 – Joe Frazier

Chapter 11 – Woody Guthrie

Chapter 12 – John Wayne

Chapter 13 – Chris Farley

Chapter 14 – Dan Daly

Bibliography

Who is J. Stephan Painter?

I was a young boy that grew up in rural East Tennessee at the base of the Smokey Mountains smack dab in the middle of Appalachia America. I was too backward to know that I was poor as well. My two older sisters and I were abandoned by our father at a very young age and we had to grow up hungry to say the least. I think that I was, and still am hungrier than most, even still at the age of fifty. But from my hunger and by the Grace of God I have learned that being a simple man is a state of mind, and not a lack of education or public worth. I have listened and I have learned that staying simple is staying true to what is real.

I have had an uncontrollable urge to write this book for many years. I know it comes from my life experiences, but I struggle with sharing my own personal life experiences with many people. I like to think that my life isn’t attractive enough or complex enough to share. I also know that I need to establish credence for my knowledge and what I believe to be a certain God given wisdom. I know that I have made, and continue to make enough mistakes. I have lived through enough tragedy to write a book about myself. But the appropriate title would be Life’s Lessons from a Dumb Shit, or Memoirs of a Crazy Man. I can’t see either one of those book titles selling many copies.

From my life experiences I grew up poor, and then into trouble. I served as a United States Marine on foreign and domestic shores. I worked for the largest Electronics Corporation in the world at the time just to get a lay off slip as my job went to Mexico. I bounced for over ten years from job to job trying to become stable again in a destabilizing economy. I was forced to re-educate myself more than once just to survive, but I did it. I have found that survival ties in with constant education. Some of it is formal, and some of it is not so formal.

I finally found my own common ground working with teen-aged boys that struggle from some of my own personal and similar issues. I also provide my technical skills to a technical college teaching young adults, and some not so young adults how to survive technically in today’s workplace. I teach computer information systems and office software applications. I now have over 15 years’ experience as a professional counselor, and 12 years’ experience as a technical instructor. I have learned to survive and make a living out of struggling. I am professional at struggling… trust me. Read close and you just might learn something that may possibly prevent some of your own potential struggles. I like to refer to it as Life’s Lessons 101: A Basic Concept: Growing Up in America.

My Synopsis

The title of this book is growing up in America because it is a blended writing of the issues in America that has gotten us to the critical point that our nation faces right now. It provides examples of both the mistakes and successes that we have made throughout the years. It describes the current social structures that we have in place. In it I discuss the mistakes of big business taking jobs overseas and forcing the re-education of our nation and trying to foster the false foundation that everything is going to be ok. I discuss some of the mistakes that our government has made throughout history that has gotten us to a nation that may not make it around the next bend without some serious repercussions unless we band together to effect change.

Each chapter takes the personal life of a significant person from our history and addresses an example from that person. Every one of them at some point in their life effected critical change in this country. Some of them carry the title of hero and everyone knows them as an everyday name. A couple of them carry the title hero and hardly anyone knows who that person is, while a couple of them are known as today’s hero, and should have never carried the title.

From their examples I discuss how the nation either helped them or hindered them. I discuss how they were either successful, or failed in their pursuits. I address how we as a nation can learn from our past by staying in reality. We need to recognize where we are today, without dreaming about tomorrow, because tomorrow never comes, while at the same time we need to recognize that the best way to do this is to recognize the inside philosophy of the individual past of our ancestors.

We need to know that we are all in this together. We need to study where we have been and what we need to do to get to where we need to go. We need to recognize that this is done together and not separately. We need to do this by recognizing that every individual forges together to become one nation under God; indivisible.

I have chosen every person with strong intent and reasoning. Almost every person I chose had serious personal issues growing into manhood. It was from poor parenting and or poverty. I want to tell the nation that people can make a difference no matter who that they are or where they come from. Every one of these men makes that strong statement.

Chapter 1 Why Listen to Me? - The Prelude

I believe most people feel that over the past decade we have all watched this country decline. Unfortunately it is more of a slide for life than it is a decline. It has also been for a lot longer than just a decade. Most people over the past several years are just waking up to the reality of it and starting to feel the pain that it has created. It is human nature to go along your path and not worry much about the next guy as long as your life and its work are ok. We seem to live with the thought process to just be charitable, and give those struggling people a helping hand out; to do this is doing your part for the benefit of mankind. Unfortunately this is no longer the answer. It was a perfect response to a semi-perfect world, but that world just doesn’t exist anymore; and truthfully it never did.

For the past sixty years it seems that we were living in what most people felt to be a perfect world. But over the past two decades some of us have been forced to deal with the pressures of what is our declining social structure, and it seems that there is no apparent recognition from others to what is happening. I believe this mentality is in the past and it was formed from an opinion that people felt the fallout was small and tolerable as long as the fallout wasn’t happening to them. I believe everyone saw it, but didn’t think that our country would slide far enough to affect the nation more than just the few, and that the few could bounce back with proper retraining and education.

Two decades later more and more people are starting to suffer from the mistakes of our nation, and the pain keeps getting worse. We are being forced to re-educate more and more people because of the growing pain of lost jobs and wages. It is spreading like a cancer, and our social structure is the organ that it is being attacked. If you just recently started to feel this pain I ask you to please listen to what I am saying and recognize that we are currently on a full throttle ride on the slide for life.

The slide needs to be controlled because this isn’t a carnival ride, and unless we control its rate of decent the landing will not be pretty. My purpose is to help us all develop an understanding of what has created our present situation. I implore that you listen to me for this reason alone. Hopefully we can pull together and we can work harder to correct the issues troubling our nation’s social and economic structures. I strongly feel that it is as much of a matter of philosophical definition and recognition as it is a matter of physically correcting the mistakes that we have made.

Our nation is losing jobs every day. Unemployment just keeps rising. It seems to me that the ones that are counting the jobs manipulate the numbers to make it seem not so bad, while it seems that the lost jobs are going to either other countries, temp agencies, or are being restructured. The jobs that we are getting in return, if we can get them in return are subpar and can’t support the life style that we all have become accustomed to. We work harder and harder just to provide less. We have become a nation where an amazingly large amount of people have multiple part-time jobs just to make ends meet. These jobs provide us with little to no benefit other than survival.

A large part of our nation cannot afford to see a doctor when serious illnesses attack. To some no insurance is available, and to others what is available isn’t affordable. The government’s answer is social welfare. Don’t get me wrong, I feel that everyone needs the right to be afforded quality medicine, especially in a nation that has been billed as the global superpower. But socialism isn’t the answer. It isn’t what has made us strong, and this mentality is nothing less than wrong for both the structure of our society and its people. It isn’t healthy both mentally and physically. I know this because I like most of our nation suffer from the same fate.

The social and economic struggles that we are suffering are creating no less than a catastrophe of human nature. From my own life experiences for over two decades I know this to be a true statement of fact. What is happening to this nation turns my soul inside out. I have struggled with speaking my mind in this writing since 1998, just to write it down and hit the delete key, saying to myself who would want to read this crap anyway? Who wants to hear about your struggles? I hit the delete key and move on until something triggers me to write it again, and then again.

I have learned however that I am not writing about my struggles. I was nothing more than early fallout. I am writing about the handwriting on the wall that I have seen for over two decades. I feel that I was supposed to have already spoken my mind, because the world needs to hear it, even if it doesn’t agree with the message it delivers. I have struggled with this feeling ever since I started feeling it, and to be honest I am struggling with writing it right now. It is not a message that I want to deliver. Please understand that I am no failure, no one that gets up in the morning to look for a job that no longer exists in the fashion that was is a failure either. I am actually fortunate to have been early fallout. I have adjusted and now make an affordable living for myself and my family.

My mind keeps telling me that no one wants to hear me preach doom and gloom; that I am nothing more than an idiot for thinking as much. But as I watch our nation decline more and more every year I feel that I have something that just needs to be said. I want to warn you that if you are weak of spirit, or want to bury your head in the sand, and feel compelled to throw this book out please don’t do it even if you feel that it isn’t for you. I tell the truth when I say that this writing is a struggle for me. I don’t like what I say, but I strongly feel that someone has to say it, and that our nation needs to listen, because in the face of adversity the strong get stronger. Trust me when I tell you that we all need to get stronger. In this writing I feel that I am working to make myself stronger. Hopefully it is strong enough so that I can help others achieve as well.

In this book I attack what I see as obvious mistakes that our country and its people have made, and I strongly feel that we are still making them. I am not writing with the hopes of providing an instant cure. Hell, there isn’t one. What I want to provide is the recognition that we as a nation are presently a sinking ship. If we work together we can bail out the water, plug the holes, and put ourselves back on the course. If we don’t I am afraid that we are not going to make it to shore.

Years ago when this idea first began attacking me, and I do mean attacking me, I thought to myself how am I going to deliver such a message? It eventually came to me that we learn from analyzing our past. What we have to deal with in life is our reality. We need to stay in today, and not tomorrow. To do this we think about yesterday, analyze what we did both right and wrong to make sure that today is as good as we can make it. Then from this analysis we need to realize that tomorrow never comes. Don’t day dream about tomorrow, just work on today, because before tomorrow gets here, it will be today.

I know this to be a correct thought process, but I thought to myself, that I am trying to address the issues of a nation, not the issues of myself. I struggled with my thoughts, and it came to me. The past of our nation is the people that have lived in our past. Our ancestors both recent and distant have left us with more than enough information to develop a sound analysis. We have examples of both success and failure that can provide us with good recognition of our present reality. Hopefully today we can soundly recognize our history, and start using it to prepare for the tomorrow that never comes.

My analysis is not intended to be a history lesson. I claim absolutely no fame to any educational concentrations in history. My intent is to deliver a lesson from history; not in history. While you read this, consider yourself to be in the class titled Life’s Lessons 101. I have done a tremendous amount of personal research over the years. I have already stated that I hit the delete key a lot, but my research isn’t deep, so it is easily brought back. It is actually from gathering books from the children’s section in libraries and basic Internet searches from two of the most common Internet search engines. I left my research shallow with a specific intent in mind.

I honestly find my research methods to be somewhat amusing. Trust me, librarians look at you strange when you request children’s books on history, and they even look at you stranger when you ask for them again and again for detail clarification. I can see their gears turning in their heads saying to themselves what does such a seemingly educated man want with these children’s books? What I wanted with my data was to let everyone recognize that this is the information that we are giving to our children.

It is true that tomorrow never comes, but we sure as hell need to plan for it. I ask you, do you take your kids to the library, and do they use the Internet to search for answers to school projects? This is why I went to the children’s section, and did basic Internet searches. From my gathered information, I think that you will be surprised with what I found. Hopefully you can look and analyze for yourself how we got here, and where we need to go.

I also claim no accuracy to my research. In fact I claim the exact opposite. Oh no what is this crazy man saying? I can feel it already. I am telling you that this is the crap that we are feeding our kids. I am telling you that I can go out on the Internet, visit as much as 20 websites, find that they all pretty much plagiarize each other, and spew inaccuracies doing it. If you don’t believe me, test my theory for yourself, and see for yourself how many Websites plagiarize each other’s work. But from using their potential inaccuracies, I have developed what I feel to be a strong and important message that we all need to understand. The most important message is that we need to give our learning to our children. That is why this class is Life’s Lessons 101. In this chapter I start with myself, whether I like it or not.

In 1990 as I watched what I thought was my career profession leave for Mexico, I said to myself that the writing is on the wall. As time progressed I further watched another large organization fail while their CEO came on national television crying about his mistakes, and to make things right he would turn down his bonus of ten million dollars. I thought about feeling sorry for him until I realized that he was paid approximately that much in a salary that year alone. Actually I felt no pain for him at all. I was watching this broadcast in the middle of the day because I was suffering from yet another layoff due to the corporate restructuring of America.

What I felt sorry about that day was the people that were about to join me on the couch watching boring assed daytime television. With this picture something is terribly wrong, and it is going to affect the future generations of this land even worse than it is affecting us if we don’t stand up for ourselves and effect change. Because of our own attitudes our children’s attitudes are in social decline; they have a what have you done for me lately mentality, when in reality we have done for them more than any other generation in this country has done for its children in the past. In essence we have done too much.

We keep giving and giving while our bank accounts keep depleting. We don’t know where the stability of tomorrow is coming from. Because we don’t want our children to view us as failures, we continue to give to them our investments for the future. This lays a false foundation. A foundation made of sand instead of rock. When the floods come, and trust me a potential flood is coming; take a look around and you can see the troubled waters rising. Our foundation is going to fail if we stay on our current and present course of action.

We need to all band together and start filling sand bags to protect our foundation in its current state. I am afraid that it is too late to prepare a solid foundation before the flood waters hit. I believe that we have waited too long, and that they are about to hit, and they are about to hit hard. We need to prepare for the immediate future, and then start laying a solid foundation for the distant future.

When my first job left the country, I was forced to recognize that excellent jobs just don’t land in your lap, unless you are damned lucky, and I wasn’t damned lucky at the time. I had several mouths to feed, and no potential prospects. I looked for work, and what I found was a job that cut my pay in over half. The man that hired me said that the job is yours if you want it; I have been looking for a good technician. When he told me how much the job paid I responded with I thought that you were looking for a good technician.

I could tell that I had just slightly angered this man, but I wasn’t too happy about my current situation either, so in my mind we were even. I took the job, and I worked it until I could better myself. I left that job and moved forward… As I look back today, I look at him with total respect. I don’t think that I have ever told him this, and I know that I won’t in person. It is just who I am. Hopefully he reads this.

He gave me a job when I was in a strange place both physically and mentally. He gave it to me when no one knew who I was, and his business was just forming. I have watched him from a distance over the years and have recognized his success. He is a man that started from the ground up. He has lived through this nation’s struggles as much as any of us, and maintains his business intact and functioning more than 20 years later. None of us could ask for any more. I owe him gratitude and thanks.

In fact he hired me three times. He hired me again and again when I always thought that the grass was greener on the other side. One might wonder why he hired me so many times, and I myself have wondered the same thing. I would like to think that it is because I am a loyal agent. What I mean is that when I am at work, no matter the circumstance, and even the pay, I give everything that I have. If it is broken and I can fix it, then I fix it. I know inside my own heart that I wake up with this mentality every day of my life.

I would however always look for greener grass. I would field phone calls from people that I hadn’t even sent a resume to. They would tell me that they were looking for a good technician. They would offer me money, and I would take it. I tell no lies, when I tell you that I fielded six job offers in one month, from companies that I didn’t even know existed, let alone applied for.

My mother was visiting when a phone call came in, and I told her what was happening. Her response was this isn’t right Stephan, it doesn’t happen this way. I left a job that was giving me less pay than I was promised for greener pastures yet again. They lived up to their bargain. They gave me a pay raise and a raise in respect; until shit hit the fan and I was the first one to go because I was the highest paid technician they had.

I was left with the question of I thought they wanted a good technician. I guess I was wrong. What I got was a false promise. But more importantly I got a phone call from the man that I owe gratitude saying to me that he heard that I was out of work, and asked me if I wanted to start making money again. He never gave me a great amount of money, but he also never gave me a false promise either, for that I thank you Steve.

This struggle in me still goes on today. I have been living it for over 20 years. I keep looking for greener pastures, and trust me, I have eaten some pretty green grass, but the grass isn’t mine. What I am trying to say, is that I feel that this isn’t the America that I went to school and learned existed.