In Ghost of Tom Joad there are many different messages that come across in the several different songs but I wanted to focus on the messages that I got from four songs; "Balboa Park", "The Line", "Across The Border", and "Sinaloa Cowboys". "Across the Border", and "The Line" spoke about the concept of illegal immigrants and why they are constantly trying to get into the U.S. To me immigration is a large problem in our country because we are constantly flooding neighborhoods with people who legally aren't supposed to be here. There are a lot of opinions that would agree we need to keep immigrants out but I believe that they are just trying to live the "dream" and move to the U.S. to start anew and a lot of immigrants are extremely hard workers who are trying harder than most "native citizens" and yet still don't have as much success. There are others though who fall into the trap of drug abuse or distribution. "Sinaloa Cowboys" and "Balboa Park" both tell the story of how lives can be truely messed up if you fall into the drug system. I can speak from relation because my older cousin who used to live across the street from me all my life started to fall into drug addictions. It started of with marijuana saying it was just recreational and he wouldn't get into harder stuff. The only problem was when the weed wouldn't give him the same "high" anymore so he started to experiment with other drugs, leading to cocain and other harder drugs. Eventually he couldn't afford the drugs so he started stealing family treasures and bartering them off for drug money. To watch someone so close to me go through something like that; to watch as his life was ruined and record scared is painful. In highschool I started to smoke weed with some of my friends but I was lucky enough to realize the negative effects it was taking on me (along with the support against it i had) and was able to make steps to quit. Even if people tell you that something isn't addictive doesn mean it won't be for you. A quote from Donald Trump that reallly does apply here is "If you never try it you cant get addicted to it". If you do want to try it understand that everyone will react differently and anyone can become addicted to anything.
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