I am the face of America's youth. My parents worked two jobs each to keep a roof over my sisters and me. We were spared the luxuries and often the rod. As America's middle class grows, the compromise between keeping in step with modern America and the time and energy to rear one's children becomes more and more complex.My parents worked long hours and hoped that my sisters and I would appreciate their efforts to give us a home in a place that wasn't their own and make something of ourselves. How sorely I disappointed them.
My morales came from a television and my heroes were on the radio. I wanted things that never made me better and often made me worse. In the pursuit of a dream that I am not sure was even mine, I dropped out of school in the ninth grade. I know that my school district only graduated 75% percent of my senior class. There are 25% more students who cheated themselves from my district, like me. We are the late bloomers, those who thought we were smarter then the system because we were independent. Because we were on our own.
If I am to be any indicator of the fate of today's youth, the results are still out. We are unlike any generation that has come before us. We fell into the gap between "should have" and "could have". We are slowly climbing out. Our success as adults rests with us alone. We understand that now is a more perilous time then ever to be a young adult. One misstep could send us spiraling into the oblivion of a statistic. We fight the good fight because with time, we came to realize that we weren't always right. Better late then never. We chase dreams with our eyes open now, because sleep is a luxury we gave up long ago when we fell in to the trenches of teenage independence. As we race against ourselves to undo what we have done to our futures, we will undoublty fall once more before we get to the end. We have been wrong before and will probably be wrong again before we get it right. Thats okay. We are the generation of children that grew up too soon. We are the generation of children who saw the demise of normal family values. No one's at fault, and yet everyone is. Believe in us as we belive in ourselves. We are America's future, the latch key kids, the ones who stood against a tide of certain distruction and fought back. We are America's youth, alone now, more then ever,

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