>>I absolutely believed that you worked hard for your success. I absolutely do not believe that you "did it all on your own." No one does.
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>>Tamar
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>Tamar, I did not have rich parents, though they certainly were middle class. I busted my butt for decades - I've made six figures every year but twice since 1999, and last year I cracked 200K. Sure, I had people who helped me along the way. My first boss (Mike Antonovich, a pretty well known name in the Fox world decades ago) took a big chance on me and taught me a ton. But I also made the most out of opportunities. Everything I have, I've earned. I'm quite certain everything Marcia has, she's earned. I'm sure you're familiar with the old line about luck being (among other things) the residue of hard work and design.
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>And I paid it forward... as you probably know, I taught for a private tech school for five years. My teaching model included (among other things) a line from Donnie Haskins (the NCAA coach at Texas Western, and immortalized in the movie "Glory Road")...I told students from day one, "My way's hard...no one is going to give you an inch of respect until you go out and you prove yourself". I taught database programming as if they were studying for the bar. I've got many success stories of adult students who went on to get jobs (and promotions) by busting their butts.
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>Yes, they had me in part to thank (and I still get emails from them) - but the ones who succeeded were the ones who worked hard. And even though I no longer teach, I still carry bits of that model around in the 20-25 community presentations I do a year. The ones who attend community events and take advantage of the content are usually the ones who will succeed in the future.
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>Sure, I utilize public works - and I also pay into that. That doesn't mean one should support an increasingly welfare state - quite the opposite, the last decade has demonstrated that government is horrible, bloody horrible at understanding the value of money.
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>The American dream is still very much alive - even though the last two administrations have definitely done their best to try to foul it up. I was not a George Bush fan and the current president has me grinding my teeth every day.
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>So precisely what is your point?

My point is simple. The "self-made man" is a myth. Success is combination of three things: ability, hard work and opportunity. We have no control over our basic ability; we're born with that. We have tremendous control over hard work. Opportunity is the big variable, and some people get a lot more of it than others, because of who they are or where they're born or the color of their skin or their sex or their sexuality or whether they're attractive or not or a ton of other factors.

You started out ahead of the game in at least four ways: you're white, male, straight and were born to middle-class parents. (That last isn't as good as being born to wealthy parents, but it beats the hell out of being born to poor ones.) I started out ahead of the game on three of those, with the added benefit of many generations before me of highly educated people on one side.

My parents and, I suspect, yours could afford to live where there were high-quality public schools that made it easy to get an education. The people around us and, I suspect, around you valued education and no one made fun of me, or, I suspect, you for doing well in school. It was assumed that I would go to college and, probably, graduate school. Etc., etc., etc.

There are a lot of people who start with a lot less than you or I and some of them never really get a chance to move up, because there are so many obstacles in their way.

Tamar