1981.

My mother was born during a turning point in American History. The country had just elected Ronald Regan as their president and unbeknownst to the people, this collective decision would lead to deficits in not only the national debt but in the moral capacity of people as the seeds of greed and capitalism were planted and nurtured and thus

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ingrained into a society that would continue to perpetuate this philosophy until they would suffer the consequences of their excessive ways 27 years later, some years after President Regan was laid to rest. Yet the unrest that he initiated during his presidency would continue to disrupt and perturb the lives of the American people for a considerably longer time. But during his inaugural, Regan boasted that in light of the "present crisis, government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem," and from the height of his seat on his white horse, he rode into the White House to save the day. His solution to government was to turn the governing branches into a well greased cog in the the machine of a well run business and as the CEO of this company he took a tough stand on unions which resulted in increased productivity but meant wages for blue collar working people remained stagnant which greatly increased the gap between the haves and the have not's

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and this would continue through his presidency so the rich got obscenely rich and everyone else worked twice as hard and wondered what it was all worth because at the end of the day, they barely had anything to show for their work. And in this hard working class is where my mother, Steely Tomskin, found herself growing up on an island in the Pacific Ocean, you may have heard of it, called Oahu, Hawaii.