Good points! Well, maybe.BasketballJayhawk wrote: ↑Wed May 12, 2021 6:40 pmYou didn't achieve it, but you had the opportunity to achieve it.MJ23 wrote: ↑Wed May 12, 2021 6:14 pmI have a unicorn I will sell you cheap. Are you interested?
Up until my early teens I set my mind to be a professional hockey player. While highly doubtful it would happen, that was my goal. No pun intended. I worked my ass off because I wanted it. Then I blew out my knee. I never accomplished my goal.
Now use me and my story as an analogy for MANY people in this country and is it not true? So please spare me the bullshit that anybody can accomplish whatever they want to if they work hard to achieve it.
Be honest, what do you currently do for a living and if you could do or be anything in the world, is your current occupation what you would ultimately choose? For the majority of Americans it is not.
That's the point.
We can't all be CEOs and professional hockey players....but we can all try to be whatever we want.
Yes, I had the opportunity to achieve it but let's be real and honest here.
I was an upper middle class white kid growing up on the North Shore of Chicago.
My parents could afford to buy me hockey equipment, drive me to practices and games, pay the excessive fees for me to play on hockey teams, etc.
Now tell me about the kids who grow up in poverty in this country - that could never even dream of playing hockey.
Here is something else I ponder, I realize and appreciate that I was extremely fortunate to experience many things that I would not have experienced if my parents were poor. For that I am forever grateful - to a degree. It was probably more a blessing than a curse but I'm someone who went from believing I will be financially successful and live happily ever after - to being a completely desolate drug addict who thought for sure he would die a broke man. I have seen and lived the highest of highs and lowest of lows. Is that a good thing about living in America? I'm probably foolish but I'll say I'm undecided.
Forgetting all that, it doesn't take a genius to realize that not every one in this country is afforded the same opportunities and because of it, I feel it's complete bullshit that EVERYONE can "accomplish anything they set their mind to. if they want it. and will work for it. they can have it".
On a semi-related note, I smirk and cringe at the same time when I think about what our founding fathers felt was important to write in the second "paragraph" of the Declaration of Independence.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness".
Yes, perhaps we are all CREATED equal but after that, like I said earlier in this post, it's all uphill or downhill from our birth to our death.
When the D.O.I. was written those with Black skin were hardly considered equal - and let's not forget that women were far from being equal to men too.
Thank God I wasn't alive then because I would be an even bigger cynical asshole than I am now in terms of how "great" this country is.
