[Conservative til I die]

Then find another career. I say this seriously. It sounds cold, but this is a fact. Tell me which is going to get you a job quicker: Protesting at a Bush rally about how it's not fair or bitching on an internet political board, or going to take some classes or new training????

[dfwgator]

or going to take some classes or new training????

Taking classes or training is not the answer. The answer is learn something on your own, then you train others on it. Taking classes just costs money, and with the Internet, there are plenty of free resources to learn new skills on your own. Then turn around and you charge others to learn from you. You take a class, then you're just competing with the others that are taking the very same class.

[Tokhtamish]

Your problem is that there is a gross disjunct between your values and reality.

You need to believe in a Dale Carnegie peptalk kind of world where anything can be solved by your own strength and resolve. History tells us that this is delusional. There is such a thing as just plain being on the wrong side of history and there is nothing you individually can do to change that. History is full of Hannibals and Yamamotos and Robert E Lees who for all their courage and genius were just plain on the doomed side. In a "free trade" world of globalization fantasizing that you can just go somewhere where globalization does not exist, as if you can just ignore what is going on in your country, as if you can just flit from career to career is believing that you can tread water forever, not facing the fact that workers in the industrialized world are on the wrong side of history, facing net downwards social mobility. You can't win a fixed game.

The only response is to fix the game right back, only this time in your favor. History is only changed when people work together to change the circumstances of their lives. The alternative is imagining yourself some Ayn Rand ubermensch who will personally overcome a pervasive reality of net downwards social mobility in this country. I don't find that very realistic.