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People like you made US what it is today, and instead of elevating success stories like yours people would rather complain that life is unfair, and that others

• r_smart 10y ago
  Thanks for the compliment. I certainly wasn't trying to paint myself as the poster boy for anything, but I think my story can be interesting for people who haven't experienced poverty, especially because I bought into a lot of the kind of thinking you describe, and letting that go was a large part of getting out of being poor. I actually am a second generation immigrant (my mother is from Panama), and even after my parents split we had a pretty hard-scrabble life with her working for minimum wage, and my father being self-employed and not much better off. Still they never took advantage of welfare programs (well, not until after I was raised, but that's a different conversation), and there was a pride associated with not doing it. It'd be foolish to say that people should never take help if it's available, but I think it's often overlooked just what a deleterious effect it can have on a person's morale. Further, as the old saying goes: Necessity is the mother of invention. People will live in whatever situation they can tolerate, so changing what you can tolerate is the necessary first step to improving your lot in life. *edit: changed 'and even after we split' to 'and even after my parents split' because I clearly lost focus on what I was writing in the middle of that sentence.