Luck

Just when I think we are getting though to young Matthew he posts sumpin' like this:

look at it as follows: some people are rich, while others are poor - how is this fair when they work the same amount? Some people work bloody hard mining, cleaning etc while others earn lots by doing relatively little. This is all down to luck, and to say that it is down to hard work I view as an attempt to justify your desire to keep your money to yourself. This is selfish, and an attemp to shut out the world so you can keep your conscience clean while others starve.

This really reminds me of sumpin' little Dickie Gephardt said about people who are not winners in life's lottery. The difference in people who do very little and people who have to work hard for the same amount of money is not luck. Pumpman's father was a coal miner. Pumpman was the first one in his family to get a college education. It was not luck. Luck had nothing to do with it. He worked hard and put himself through college.

Matthew has had bad luck. He was born with Cerebral Palsy and unfortunately he was in the UK so he wasn't able to have Baby Face sue everyone involved with his birth. Yeah, that was bad luck, but life isn't fair and it is not the gummint's function to make it fair. The gummint can pass laws to give the people equal opportunity and equal access. We have the ADA here in the United States to make buildings and transportation accessable to people with disabilities. I have not found any country more accessable than the United States. We also forbid discrimination of people with disabilities.

Caution! Boring story follows.

I was born in 1946 in St. Louis and I grew up in a suburb called Webster Groves. I am at the leading edge of the Baby Boomers who are gonna bankrupt the Social Security system. My family was lower middle class. My father's drinking problem got worse in the middle 50's and that is when my mother had to go to work to help support the family. Bad luck! I was poorer than my friends.

My sister studied hard and made good grades. She was lucky that she was smart, but she also used those smarts. I didn't. I was an average student. I did well in Math, History, and English. I flunked Physics. (In college I got A's in Physics because I had the math to understand it. You gotta have calculus to understand Physics.)

Both my sister and I started working at an early age. She babysat. I mowed lawns, raked leaves, shoveled snow, and worked in the school cafeteria. I guess I was lucky that there were people in my neighborhood who wanted yardwork done. I was lucky to live across the street from a lady who worked for the school system in the cafeteria and she got me that job.

I guess my sister was lucky that she won a four year scholarship to Washington University in St. Louis. It had nothing to do with her straight A's all through school, the honors classes that she took, or her high scores on the National Merit Test and the SAT. Nope. The hard work didn't matter. It was all luck.

I didn't win a scholarship. I had to attend junior college and I promptly flunked out. This was bad luck. It had nothing to do with me not being ready for college. More bad luck followed. My mother welcomed me to the real world by telling me I had better get a job 'cause I was gonna have to start paying room and board. My father told me I would also have to start paying my own car insurance. This was real bad luck! None of this stuff was my fault.

I got a job working in the mailroom of an insurance company. This was entry level. I was paid 10 cents an hour above minimum wage. Most of the other people in the mailroom were also unlucky. They had decided not to go to college and to work this deadend job and maybe eventually become a supervisor. There wasn't much of a future.

More bad luck was to follow. My draft status was now 1A. I was almost certain to get drafted so I decided to join the Navy. I was lucky and did well on the aptitude tests and was guaranteed an electronics school. Yep! It was all due to luck.

After boot camp I attended electronics school at Great Lakes Naval Training Center in North Chicago. I did very well in school. My average was very high.
It was all due to luck. It had nothing to do with my studying real hard.

I related in another post how much fun I had tracking down my first ship. My specialty was communications, but since I had become an inquisitive fellow, I learned how to repair the radar gear. This was also a stroke of good luck because in the last year of service when I was on the Iredell County, I was the only ET who could fix anything. The other ET, who outranked me couldn't. It's amazing all of the stuff you can get away with when you are the only person who possesses a critical skill. For the rest of my working career I was gonna somehow have the good luck to be in this position. It would have nothing to do with me deciding to learn things on my own and take advantage of opportunities. It would all be luck.

When I got out of the Navy I attended college on the GI Bill. I stayed at home and paid room and board to my mother. I attended the junior college and this time I was lucky. I made mostly A's and a few B's. It had nothing to do with me studying. It was all luck.

I also had a part time job delivering flowers. Once again I was lucky. We had four routes: north, south, west, and around the park (Forest Park for those who know anything about St. Louis). I was the only driver who could run all the routes. It had nothing to do with me learning the city and the fastest ways to get around. It was all luck. Because I was so lucky to have learned the city so well the owner of the flower shop allowed me to fit my work around my school schedule.

On weekends I delivered Where Magazine. It's a magazine delivered to hotels every week that would tell visitors what was going on. I was lucky to get this job. Actually I was. A friend of mine got the job managing the Where office in St. Louis and when the previous person quit, he offered me the job.

I also stayed active in the Naval Reserve and got paid for attending a meeting every Wednesday night. It was pure luck that I had been in the Navy so I was able to stay active in the Reserve.

My first car when I got out of the Navy was a piece of crap. I was lucky. Since I couldn't pay anyone to fix my car I had to do it myself. Wasn't that luck? I had a lemon and that taught me how to work on cars. I was to continue doing all my routine maintenance until my accident.

I burned out in my junior year of college. I was able to continue my job at the flower shop full time while I looked for a job. I was lucky that I was the best driver. That allowed me to continue working until I found a better job.

In 1973, I was hired by TCIDNN (The Company I Dare Not Name). It was pure luck that I got hired. It had nothing to do with me scoring high on the aptitude tests. I had been looking for work for seven months and every company had a similar aptitude test. I got lucky. I asked every company that administered the tests to go over my wrong answers with me. By the time I took the TCIDNN test I had seen most of the questions so I scored very high. Sure was lucky I had reviewed all those previous tests. It was all luck.

In 1988 I experienced some real bad luck. I fell out a tree and broke my back leaving me partially paralyzed from the waist down. The accident had nothing to do with me doing sumpin' stupid. Nope it was all bad luck. Not my fault. Bad luck.

But I was lucky. I got enough return that I was able to walk again with braces and crutches. It took me a long time. It had nothing to do with me working my ass off. It had nothing to do with me measuring my driveway and seeing how many times up and down the driveway I had to walk to walk a mile. It had nothing to do with me walking up and down my driveway to walk a mile every day. Nope. It was all luck that I was able to walk again.

When I went back to work, we were experiencing problems with our system support staff. My group needed more programming work done and the people who were supposed to provide it would not give us what we wanted. I saw an opportunity. I taught myself how to be a systems programmer. It had nothing to do with me working 12 hour days and some weekends. It was all pure dumb luck.

Another reason I worked my butt off was I didn't want anyone to say that the only reason I had a job was because I was a cripple. I outworked my peers. I got good raises and awards every year. It had nothing to do with my performance. It was all luck.

All through my working life I have always saved money. When I was out at sea I sent money home to be invested. After I was hired by TCIDNN I took advantage of every savings program offered. As a result, I am now a very wealthy person. I live in a house twice the size of the house I grew up in. My sister's house is just like mine, only bigger. (Inside joke) I own two BMW's and a pickup truck.

All of this is totally due to good luck. I didn't have to work at anything. Everything just fell into my lap. I had choices to make along the way and I guess I'm just lucky that I made a lot of the right choices. It had nothing to do with hard work and planning. It was all luck.

I was lucky to survive all the downsizing. I guess I was lucky that I had taught myself critical skills that TCIDNN needed. Once again, I was the only person in my group who possessed those critical skills. Pure dumb luck.

My sister and her husband are the same way. He was the first person in his family to attend college. They are wealthier than I am and you know why? They're luckier than I am. It had nothing to do with them getting an education and working hard at their jobs. It was all luck.

My story is not the exception. Anyone in this country, if he/she has average intelligence and is willing to get an education and work hard can make it in this country. The dirty little secret that the liberals/socialists in this country don't want the losers to know is that many of the people who are now in the top 20% of inccome level started out int the bottom 20%.

Look at Baby Face. His father was a millworker and now he is a millionaire lawyer who is responsible for driving many doctors out of business and driving up the cost of health care. He made it by suing doctors who didn't perform C-sections on women who delivered babies with Cerebral Palsy. Had Matthew's parents lived in the United States they could have had Baby Face sue and they would probably be millionaires.

As for the taxes. I realize taxes are a necessary evil, but we are overtaxed. Our gummint is too large. The Great Fucking Society was/is a disaster. It turned 40 years old last Friday. With all the trillions that we have thrown at poverty, it still exists. I have said it many times. 90% of the poor are poor because they made poor choices. The two most egregious ones are dropping out of school and having children they cannot afford.

I do not mind helping out people who have had genuine bad luck like accidents or disease. I resent having my money seized from me to support people who are irresponsible. I do not like supporting welfare brood mares.

This is the land of opportunity. I know many people like me who started out with nothing and are now doing very well. I guess they were just lucky also.

Oh and as to feeding starving people, the United States doles out huge amounts of foreign aid. We were gonna give a bunch of grain to an African nation, but it was the EU who put a stop to that because the grain was genetically modified.
How is your conscience about that, Matthew? Don't lecture the United States about helping out starving nations. And why should we give money to nations that hate us? Why should we give money to the United Nations where the majority of the countries hate us?

Is it our fault that failing nations are so unlucky to be ruled by incompetent gummints where the officials steal the money we give them as aid? Look at Zimbabwe. Because it is now a country embracing Matthew's beloved socialism it has gone from a net exporter of food to a net importer of food. Ooops! More bad luck. Has nothing to do with an incompetent gummint.

Yep! It's all due to luck. Luck, that's the ticket!