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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • Life is hard and it seems like people are constantly fighting and dying around you from the moment you’re born. It’s all you know. Everyone around you is sick, destitute, and miserable. There are no jobs. You have no education. You know nothing but struggle and see no future for yourself.

    The army is the only hand reaching out and offering to help pull you up, so you grab it.

    I grew up in a very rural area. This describes the situation there decades ago.

    I don’t have exact numbers, but I would say something like 10-15% of my class actually went on to higher education. Probably less, and definitely less than that finished.

    Very, very many went into some branch of the military. When the first war on Iraq started I figured that might be our generation’s Vietnam and that many of my graduating class would be fodder for it. Luckily for them, that ended up not being the case.

    In any case, songs like Born in the USA and Fortune Son really land pretty hard…















  • Back when Americans still were almost 100% operating under the stupid protein myths (these days, I think it is a least a little better, but there has been a huge rise in marketing protein to people as if they aren’t getting enough, lol, so I really don’t know if people have a better grasp of nutrition now or not, even with easily-available information sources now online. Back then, spotting a vegetarian in the wild outside of major metro areas, anyway, was like spotting Bigfoot and the very concept of not eating meat was something that made most people’s brains short out.) and virtually everyone thought you needed a big portion of some meat on your plate… my boomer parents were trying to scrape by, they would have liver about once or twice a week to make ends meet.

    It wasn’t until a bit later when they read a bit more about vegetarianism that they realized they could easily sub in things like beans/rice to round out meals and not only was it far safer and a lot less disgusting, it was cheaper and had an incredibly long shelf life. And they didn’t have to worry about the family being malnourished or anything.