WinningIsLosing

My ledger, which happens to be a little black book, is dedicated to keeping track of money given to foster children. These kids are my kids and I need to find a way to help them through life, as any good parent would. It's not easy since there are so many of them, 300,000-500,000 a year, I've narrowed it down to the 40,000-60,000 that age out of the system being the ones at the most risk. These kids are the ones that don't get adopted, for whatever reason, and at eighteen are kicked out of the system. They may or may not have the support they need after leaving their last foster home and that's where I come in. Sometimes these kids don't even have ID and have no idea how to go about getting one. This too I can help them with.

Can you imagine? As if these kids don't have it hard enough, not having any family, they also leave the system without money, an education, driver's license, a car, a cell phone, a place to live and so much more. Most people don't understand what going through life without anyone is really like, we take for granted the people closest to us. It's even harder to convey all the little things that family does for a person, the things without words to describe them yet make up who we are. We may not have words for them but we do have words for those without them; foster kids.

We started calling these kids foster after the system that cares for them. Then we decide to refer to unwanted pets with the same words, which I think is a mistake. My wish is that we start calling these kids something else. It would go a long way, I think, to calling these kids students of some kind. Like cultural students, or something like it. I think they use cultural for foreign exchange students but I'm not positive on that. Anyway, what a person is called or referred to as is important especially when society has tarnished what "foster kid" means.

Today the words foster kid is almost like a dirty word that that describes an animal more then it does a person. My kids have little hope of a productive future where they are successful and participating in their lives. My kids are the ones that fall through the cracks and no one even notices. Like the orphans that were sent to Dozier in Florida, never to be seen or heard from again. Their bones scattered through the ever glades or in unmarked graves, their names lost to everyone and forever. This is not an unusual story, unwanted children have been used for even worse throughout human history. We would like to think that we have evolved out of these barbaric practices but have we? Maybe we are just getting better at getting away with it. It took over a hundred years and the death of a child with family to end the nightmare these kids where living in Florida. Will we ever know how many children they killed there? Probably not since the orphans have no one to ask them to dig up their bones. Not to mention the ones they didn't even bother to bury. Their bones are probably scattered by animals.

What kind of a life do these children have to look forward to? They certainly don't get the same opportunities as other children. If you don't think that they know their future is bleak, take a look at their present, they know. They could be surrounded in luxury, someone else's, a painful reminder of the life they will never have. Even pretending ends, everything ends, except the endless reminders that you're not good enough.

Needless to say, if I was to win $20,000 the government will take most of it, of course, the rest I would give to my children. It won't be nearly enough but it will be a good start to helping them when they leave the system. It may also go a long way to finding a financial institution to handle money for these kids. How hard would it be to set something up for these kids future? The money they get from the government could be used to pool with other foster kids and invested wisely could generate money for their future. We do this for others that don't even need it these kids really do. Maybe not all the money the state provides but a small percentage. Over time these funds could grow to potentially sustain these kids later in life. It beats having them kill themselves or commit crimes against the innocent.

For those of us that consider these kids lost causes. They are only lost because no one is paying attention to them and their fate. We like to just write them off sweep them under the rug. We leave them for the predators and serial killers because who else is going to have any use for them? Society is also very good at getting these kids to kill themselves before they become too big of a burden. There is nothing that society does to prevent these kids from killing themselves. Just the opposite. It may be subconscious but it is definitely the message you get when you have no one.