An ex friend was desperate. His family had abandoned him. He had no place to live, no money to survive. I relocated from a city I loved to the toilet bowl of the USA to start a business with him. I thought I could save for retirement and pull him out of hell at the same time. I paid over $10K in attorney fees to draft a contract exchanging 50% in a company I created in exchange for faithful monthly repayments at 0% interest. I leased him a car, bought us company vehicles, paid for corporate and health insurance, paid for all our starting inventory, and treated my "friend" like a brother. Long story short. He met a girl, got her pregnant, and she convinced him to steal the business--all the inventory, all the money in the business bank account, the business vehicles. I lost my entire life savings. He also stuck me with the IRS and state tax bills--BOTH our halves. I maxed out my credit cards taking him to court. He never even bothered to show up b/c the State of IL refused to hear the case (for criminal grounds) because, as the Attorney General's office told me, "There's just not enough money involved to be worth our time." I won a default judgment in civil court (a joke) that's worthless b/c of the "justice system" in the US. It's impossible to collect.
And then there was the family who moved into the house my mom died in as a rental and then never paid a single month's rent after the first month. The bank foreclosed and turned around to sell the house to the same family for 60-cents on the dollar. I lost every penny of equity. The courts, police, lawyers all refused to help. Not enough money.
Or the bloody rape at the hands of five elite Finals Clubs members in the basement of Eliot House my sophomore year. The university not only didn't believe me, but they tossed me out of Eliot for "lying" at the insistence of the elites' powerful families. I slept on the streets or on gross night job sites from junior through senior years. I once had to sleep in a feces-encrusted public restroom at an IHOP I used to clean near Fenway Park.
Many more. I'm sure we all have 'em. Because justice is insubstantial or too expensive to come by, the injuries can be like gaping knife wounds that never heal b/c the next one comes too quickly. And finally, you're too old for anyone to give a damn about even though you've got decades and decades of "life" left. If you're not well-off by 40 or from money, you might as well be dead. Seems so to me.
Sorry for the long ramble. I can't summarize how much I've come to loathe humanity in general. People are treated according to how much others value them. There are billions of us. Any one of us who doesn't have enough resources to gift others can be worth less than the excrement on the underside of another's shoe.
