Please remember that you are choosing to read my opinions.

I feel that before you read anything else written by me, you should know where I come from when I write. I think that sometimes people forget that what they read isn't just truth, an opinion, or a lie, but that everything has a certain validity. Everyone has shared experiences, and unique experiences. For example, most people who read this blog will be from the United States. All Americans, regardless of what they think, have certain values and beliefs that people of other countries have a hard time understanding. This holds true for Americans, who also have a hard time understanding people that aren't American.

When I write something, I try to take things into consideration that I normally wouldn't. I try to understand where people come from, why they do the things they do, and I will admit to being pretty good at what I do. Even so, I am still a 21 year old male American college student in West Virginia who studies behavioral sciences. I still grew up in a broken home, I still was raised primarily by my mother and great-grandmother, and my dad was still an alcoholic who I saw every other weekend.

To understand how my experiences effect the way I process the world is hard, but it helps to realize that someone who isn't from my generation, who grew up wealthy, and studied business at yale isn't going to understand why I feel the way I do about certian subjects and more than I might understand them.

Let's use a very common example of social influence. An American grows up in "the land of opprotunity". Everyone in the world doesn't grow up with the mindset that they live in "the land of opprotunity" with the "american dream" in their hearts (though so many do as immigration proves). How does growing up with this mindset affect the way we view things like, social inequality for example? In America we automatically think that everyone has the same opprotunity as everyone else to become Donald Trump, or at least something more than vagrants. We think that affirmative action programs work just because disadvantaged minorities are given chances at higher education that they normally wouldn't have.

What we don't understand is that for some people the cards are stacked against them. If you grow up on the streets, chances are you'll die on the streets. In is true that our society  has social mobility, but  we don't understand that someone who has grown up disadvantaged, in bad schools and with the understanding that they aren't smart enough to do things without the help they feel they deserve, that they aren't going to be able to take off once they are in college.  And growing up in these situations, you don't feel like you are living in the land of opprotunity any longer, so you are disenfranchized.

Other counties, however, understand this problem. They understand that people can't do everything on thier own. Their cultural background is different than ours in that respect, so they view everything from affirmative action to health care differently than us.

To understand the person, you need to understand where they come from. To understand how a person views the world, you've got to understand where they are viewing the world from. My shared experiences make me very predictable. The way I processed my experiences make me less predictable, and my unique experiences make it even harder, but there are only so many variables. My dad was an alcoholic, am I an alcoholic or do I have a more healthy relationship with booze? Or did I get drunk off of mouth wash when I was four years old which turned me off from drinking?

So, next time you read something and I am giving what you feel is an off the wall opinion on the world, think about what I am bringing to the discussion, and understand that I'm not putting my opinion above your own because I think you are wrong, but that I understand the validity of everyone's opinions based upon where they are coming from. I understand that president Bush might think that trickle down economics are best for america because he has always been in the part of america that benefited the most from those policies. And when I say something like that, remember that I grew up in West Virginia, the last place in the United States that benefits from such policies.