Growing up in blue collar Michigan

I grew up in a little bungalow on N. Union Street. My mother, during her pregnancy with me, worked as a scab worker in a manufacturing job. Does anybody really WANT to be a scab worker? NO, but times were and still are tough here.

I started working when I was 14 in a little greenhouse that was allowed to use minors (and get away with paying them less). I've had newspaper routes and lemonade stands. I've worked in several different kinds of factories (car parts, bubblegum, greeting cards), had lots of retail experience (I worked in a little shoe store for most of my high school years) and I even had a waitressing job (but it didn't last long, I kept spilling drinks on people).

When I was ready to go to college, I had a really tough time. No one wanted to take me because I was a C student. (George Bush was a C student and somehow he got into Yale) I didn't really apply myself as much as I should and I had working parents who didn't have the time to always watch over me. So, when I talked to my "guidance" counselor, they told me that my only option was this little school in the Upper Peninsula, Northern Michigan University, that had liberal admissions standards and no application fee, I jumped at it. When I graduated, as I walked down the stage with my diploma, I stared into a sea of Union jackets. You know what that tells me? That I was among many 1st generation college graduates.

Let me tell you a little bit about the working man. In Michigan at least, it's very blue collar/white collar. The blue collar doesn't trust the white collar and the white collar doesn't respect the blue. This is the mentality. In college, I defined myself as a "classist" because of my poor experiences with the rich. For example, there was a guy that was interested in me from Grosse Pointe (a very wealthy suburb of Detroit). Instead of asking me out to dinner, he gave me $20 to clean his house and let me play the music really high. It turned me off. I ended up dating a guy (for 7 years) who grew up in a trailer park. He was very intelligent (arrogant, but intelligent) and he now works as a professor at a better college than the one he went to. When I moved out to Baltimore, Maryland to be with him, I was exposed to more compassionate people with money-Maryland is a wealthy state, so my attitude began to change in that respect.