Poverty is not a personal choice, but a reflection of society

The "fuck you" attitude can be summarized as people won't go the extra mile to help other people. It is the non-sympathy, non-action I get from everyday people (including the police) when something injustice or misfortune happens to other people or the common interest. It is also the non-forgiving attitude when someone makes a dumb mistake. It is selfish and at the same time not wrong. It reflects somewhat in the Shit Town podcast that I listened to lately.

I won't go into the details, but personally, I have worked with the local police recently on two separate incidents, and they were surprisingly bad. It was different from my previous experiences when I first moved to the US ten years ago. That "fuck you" attitude is what I experienced and have to deal with every day when I was in Vietnam, my home country. I'm not shocked, or that annoyed to have to deal with it every once in a while, but I feel it wasn't that way when I moved. I feel I get less and less of the extra miles the more I stay in here. I can't help but feel that people are getting stiffer and stiffer somehow.

For the context, I am and have been living in the midwest. What's surprising is that I'm not even depressed, and life is getting easier for me professionally, personally, and financially. Something just doesn't feel right. Or maybe I was just romanticizing my early days in the US for me. Or maybe I'm about to have another mid-life crisis.

I'm an immigrant too, and I used to think I was in a bad situation. However, I think you don't understand how bad it could get for some American people. Being a poor immigrant won't give you a free pass when you talk about being in a shitty situation.

The other day, I talked to an white male American student worked with me in the same lab for an REU program. He was attending college in computer science, not a "fun choice" like you said. He had to deal with and provide food for a drunk dad, an ill mom, and a sister. The whole family depended on him and at the time had no social security. He complained to me about his sister's boyfriend stealing food from his fridge. Now, how the fuck do you blame him for being poor because of making poor choices? What choices could he make?

>Young people are consistently being told lies like "you can be anything you want"

They have been told that way since forever. Why should that all the sudden make a difference?

>They like, say, art, so they spend 4 years studying something they could learn in a library or on YouTube, only to find out that the market for painters is crowded and tiny.

You're ignorant in thinking that people can learn art by watching Youtube and go to the library. That's what all the people who did MOOC thought, and guess what happened to the MOOC hype? The reality is way more nuanced than that. People learn to draw by taking long lessons and looking for hours at real scenes, real people, real sculptures in the studio, not watching 10 minutes youtube video and looking at the 2D Instagram picture on the 25 inches screen. We're very far from that "learn shit from Youtube" pipe dream.

>We need much better guidance for the young.

We need it but we also need people to understand not to blame people for being poor. You were poor due to no fault of your own, so why do you think others are poor because of their fault? You were given your chance to success, so the best you can do is to think that way about other people.