What a shame that I have to agree with you on that.
Everything you have posted tonight just proves that anyone with the 'get-up-and-go' can make it, regardless of how they start out. And it also goes for people that decide they like their job at Walmart.
When I was 17 and a senior in high school my mom was babysitting for a couple. He was the western Arkansas regional manager for Wal-Mart that also included Louisiana.
I was working on getting into the the Air Force Academy (you have to get a Congressional appointment and it's not easy) and evenutally got an appointment to the Naval Academy. I didn't get in.
So I shifted to my second choice of going to the University of Arkansas. Tuition back then was $235 a semester. One day the father came to pick up his kids and he and I were talking. He said to me, "forget the U of A, come work for me and I'll train you and I promise in a few years you'll be doing well. Wal-Mart is growing big".
Well, my mom wouldn't accept that because I was the first one in the entire family in history to go to an actual college. Had I not went and took him up on his offer I'm sure I'd be incredibly rich today. He went on to the upper executive levels of the company. He and his wife and now grown with kids daughters are still very good friends to this day.
But we make choices. I've made a lot of bonehead ones along the way. I've quit jobs others that are whining on this thread would die for on simple principle. Did I suffer sometimes. Sure. I've been up and down over my 45 young years.
But I never asked for a handout, never whined about the evils of the system (oh, I could complain about the inequities of those treated differently that weren't up to my level, but that's one reason I left those jobs) or demanded some kind of compensation from others earnings.
The thing that really, really pisses me off is that these whiners actually think they are in some kind of unique circumstance and everyone else has it made only based on where they are now, what they do, or how much they make.
None of this is carved in stone. They totally ignore the individual and their standing. Not everyone making $8 is suffering. Not everyone making $20 is sitting on easy street. Hell, listen to the union idiots. They make $25-40 an hour making cars in Detroit and after 25 years have nothing to show for it and then demand help if a factory closes.
This is the mindset of the left and the peasant mentality brought over here from the old European countries that even today are trying to escape. It's the mindset to a point the left even write it into their scripts. Take the first Spiderman movie. Uncle Ben is portrayed as a poor slob that was the CHIEF ELECTRICIAN at a manufacturing plant for 30 YEARS but never paid off his mortgage or had one dime in savings.
Now, what mentality thinks like this? How could an electrician even in the day it was a vocation and not a required degreed job not get paid enough to at least pay off a mortgage on a home bought originally in the 1950's? It's impossible unless he was horribly bad at finances or drank or gambled, etc.
Yet it's there in our "pop culture". And here we still see it amongst people with computers whining about making ends meet.
You sometimes just have to shake your head. Or laugh. I can't decide.