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Land Of Promise: Chasing the Dragon

As we assume for this assignment that our readers have no idea about our socioeconomic background, I will go into a richly detailed but maximally streamlined summary of my socioeconomic standing and history. Who am I; socioeconomically? I hadn’t really stopped to think about it extensively before but this assignment has opened up my eyes on a few different levels. 

First I must explain the concept of Life Chances. Life Chances  are exactly what they sound like -  much like the first turn in the games of Life or Stratified Monopoly, Life Chances are essentially the random grab-bag of capita and opportunities we are handed at some indiscriminate time in some incomprehensible way before birth. Whatever kind of life we know that we deserve or are owed or belong in is irrelevant. We are trapped with ourselves and we are forced to play our hands. The hand I have been dealt with my Life Chances is arguably as fair as anyone else’s.

My father owns his own small maintenance business and my mother is enjoying the benefits of unemployment. Though I have been noticing increasing concern in our socioeconomic stability, my father continues to support family expenses alone, and my mother does whatever she can to contribute to his, and the family’s cause. I should mention Lifestyle next. Dziagwa’s traditionally hold the belief that the lifestyle we must adopt within the moment for reasons of survival is somehow beneath us, and we can and should, even when acting beneath our worth, still strive to achieve what we as tax-paying red blooded Americans damn well deserve in this life. Lifestyle Choices are choices which we as individuals or a group make about how to live, which are heavily influenced by class affiliation, ideology, culture and status. One of the lifestyle choices of a Dziagwa is to continue to fight for better living. 

The Dziagwa Family that we have today comes from an anccenstor named Rasmus Nielssen of Denmark. Rasmus, a prominent man and a man who had inherited the true viking spirit of his ancestors, somehow made it from Denmark to the American South, where he established plantations down in the Florida area. In the true American Spirit, he exemplified the zeitgeist of rising Southern American industry and imported slaves from nearby sources. The Dziagwa line comes from the descendants of Nielsson and a steamy affair with a nondescript French Caribbean. Polish inductees to the family running bathub gin and other brewed liquors during prohibition have forsakenly turned our path toward the American Midwest from Florida - where my half-Polish mother introduced Irish Catholic and her conversion to Protestant heritage to our family. Her father may have also been Native American. I have not even realized until now that I am essentially a by-product of the American dream. We are consumed with the idea of The Land of Promise.

        My ancestry comes from immigrants moving here to pursue wealth through industry, immigrants moving to escape famine and national economic depravation, dejected illegitimate slave children on the pursuit of happiness, and people who had everything they were looking for and now are just fighting to remain as a culture. Unfortunately, our lifestyle choices have often been fighting for our very survival but there is promise: what were the lifestyle choices that the RumRunners in our family made differently? How did the slaves rise up even with the cards dealt to them? They must have realized something about class stratification. They must have realized ways to secure their status while still pimping the limitations and advantages of their status within society to make the ways of the world work for us. They were able to find the class that they wanted to be associated with and yet acquire the money of the classes that this status gave them access to and credibility with. We naturally love people and want to see the best for everyone. Everyone safe, everyone happy. But once a Dziagwa can accept that, much like the slave soldiers of the Civil War, we are "buffalo soldiers"- The world is theirs. I think this assignment is helping to awaken the starvation within me that my forefathers have used to fuel their disposition as World Eaters.