I'm a therapist. I'm supposed to know how to do this...

But, I don't. And, I don't know what to do with that.

I provide mental health support services as a contractor for Job Corps. I’ve done it for almost two years now. Every day. Five days a week. Nine or ten hours a day. I’ve seen these strong, smart, tough, vulnerable, hard working, wonderful young people laugh. I’ve seen them cry. I’ve seen them at their most victorious. I’ve seen them struggling with what looked like ultimate defeat. I’ve seen them walk across a graduation stage in caps and gowns in triumph. I’ve seen them overcome addiction. I’ve seen them break generational poverty cycles.

Yesterday, at approximately 3:30 PM we were told in a center-wide meeting that the private company that has been carrying out operations for the Department of Labor’s Job Corps program will be shutting down completely, effective 6/30/25. There was something about terminating contracts with DOL for convenience. It was obviously hard to watch so many people who have spent the last ten, twelve, fifteen or better years working to help young people from disadvantaged backgrounds build a future, get told this was it. After fifty years, they’re shutting the doors.

I think what is harder for me is watching the most vulnerable among us, yet again, get reduced to tic marks on a page, numbers on a spreadsheet.

The excuse used in the budget was a cute one. It cited instances of “violence” and “sexual abuse/assault.” These are both pretty rich reasons for ending a program that often houses and assists troubled youth, coming from a Whitehouse that pardoned every violent criminal associated with trying to overthrow our government on 1/6/21; and that is currently headed by a person who was found civilly liable for sexually abusing a woman (and who bragged about sexually assaulting multiple women by grabbing them by their genitals).

That’s just locker room talk though, isn’t it?

Me? Financially, I’ll likely be fine — or at least fine enough. I’m not losing a job. I’m a contractor. The main people I work for will just reshuffle me somewhere else. My independent license saves my ass yet again.

The next time someone says something as stupid as “Going to college isn’t a good investment”… God. I want to tell you to smack them. I want to tell you that so much. But, don’t. I’m not telling you that because it’s wrong and I’m not okay right now. So. Maybe just give them the finger and tell them that their mothers perform fellatio in purgatory or something. I don’t know. Just don’t hit ‘em.

My college education and years of work come through yet again. I’ve dodged a bullet. This time. I don’t know where or how I’ll end up once these medicaid cuts and massive changes to student loans go through. And, they will all go through.

Listen. I want you to know that when you say shit like “Well, why should my taxes go to pay for other people’s student loans” that it’s a stupid statement. Your tax dollars are being used to kill innocent people in Gaza and they’ve been used for decades to do worse to your own countrymen. You haven’t had a single issue with any of that. Yet, when it comes to helping someone, you get indignant. Pick a lane.

I don’t know a soul who’s asking you, personally, to write a check every month to cover their entire loan payment. Every person I’ve met only wants to be able to afford the payment they have, even if it takes them fifty years to pay everything back. And, that includes me. I don’t want your fucking money. Chances are I paid more in taxes last year than you make in salary, anyway. I despise the fact that that gigantic pile of cash that the federal government took from me, went for weapons of destruction and to help starve kids in a strip of land that Israel is pissed at; instead of helping people.

I’m ranting. Sorry not sorry. I just need you to know you suck as a human if the above mentioned thought process is yours.

Anyway.

What I’m trying to say is, this probably won’t hurt me that much. It’ll be an inconvenience more than anything. I’ll have an office to pack up and some stuff to store or give away.

But, to these young people, though. For a lot of them, this program was the difference between life in jail. Or life on the street. Or a life of poverty. It was hope. It was a way out. It was opportunity. Opportunity. The word that politicians — especially Republicans — and the wealthy like to throw around like salt bae. That cheap, plastic, silly word that basically means “Avenues for me to exploit others for more wealth.” A lot of opportunity just got stripped away from people who didn’t deserve it. All to fund whatever tax cut or vanity superweapon the Christo-fascists in Washington, D.C. have a hard-on for this week.

I shouldn’t be surprised, really. The middle class’s tax dollars never mattered. We pay in every year and every time the hillbilly idiot contingent gets scared that the LGBTQ community or black and brown people might get a leg up in this country, they fear-vote for maniacs who soothe their rabid racism with fake patriotism. Then, we get to spend 20 years trying to recover from the economic devastation their covetous stupidity causes; only to repeat the exact same cycle AGAIN.

I guess what I’m saying is, I’m angry. I’m sad. I feel hopeless. I feel cheated. I have millions of anger thoughts rolling around and not a one of them are about making peace and singing Kumbayah.

I’m a therapist. You know? I’m supposed to have this shit on lock. I’m supposed to have all these magical coping skills and jargon phrases, like mindfulness and acceptance and other stuff. But, it either escapes me or it’s just not working. I’m angry because of how much this offends me. I’m not offended in a way that being called names offends one. I’m offended in a place of logic; in a place of decency; in my humanity. I’m offended the way the smell of a dead skunk offends one’s senses. I’m offended the way that people like Joel Osteen or MLM Huns offend one’s sense of what is right and wrong.

I’m supposed to know what to do with this intense anger and how to handle it. And, I don’t.

And, I don’t know what to make of that. I surely don’t.

I just know these young people deserve better and that the ENTIRETY of the Trump administration and every human who supports them deserves to burn in Hell for the pride and joy they take in their vulgar expressions of the corrosive evil inside them.