Quote:
Originally Posted by citycenter
Work hard Pizzuti and you too could one day afford a unit in that building. Out of pure curiosity, would you still have the same opinion of "evil rich white men" if you were one of them?? I doubt you would be complaining if you had the financial wherewithal to write a blank check for one of these units  |
Ok, this is a response to the self-admitted "rant," and once I'm done with this one post I'll drop it regardless of whether you post a response because I think the other people in the forum deserve to have this stay as on-topic as possible.
I never even mentioned "evil rich white men." And I always find the "work hard" diatribe amusing and ill-informed. Here's why:
I made good choices and I'm proud of them. I got good grades in high school, went to college and worked my way through to pay rent and got a decent GPA and two undergraduate degrees. I came from a white, middle-class background and had it easier than most. I could have set myself up to make a lot of money someday, but I chose to become a freelance writer and a high school teacher in low-income urban schools (student teaching this fall as part of a graduate school program - Montbello High School!) because that is my interest. I'm
probably not going to be rich.
Do I sometimes resent some wealthy guys? It depends on the individual, but yes, I'm going to have to admit that I occasionally feel it even when I don't want to. I had friends in college who had never had a job because their parents paid for things, who got drunk instead of doing schoolwork so got a 2.5 gpa, who went skiing in Vail every weekend and gave me shit for not going with them but my reasoning was that a season pass would cost an entire month's rent. Then they bragged to me that their brother-in-law hooked them up with a senior-year internship making $22 an hour to type pricetags into an excel spreadsheet for 3 of the 8 hours they were paid for - while I was earning $7 making sandwiches in the best job I can find that let me work from 7-11pm when I don't have class. And by "they" I mean several people whose situations were similar to the one example I gave. OK yes, I sometimes resent that - you can probably tell I do - and once I cussed a roommate out because he said we shouldn't have scholarships for minorities because "where else are we gonna get our trash men and janitors?"
But I don't assume every rich person came from that. It would be unfair for me to take so little information about someone and pretend its fact that he came from weathy parents and never worked hard in his life. I admire people who got there on their own and I really admire people who got there on their own and give back. SIMILARLY, it's extremely unfair to you or somebody else assume someone didn't "work hard" because he or she finds him/herself on the other end of the spectrum.
Beause the thing is, I never resented the rich guys for being rich. Absolutely not; I'd LOVE for my kids to have what they had. I resented them for being holy-fucking-ignorant.
(I have a friend who is a black guy who was on trial a few years ago because an off-duty Denver cop called him a n***** at a bar, and when he drunkenly confronted the also-drunk off-duty cop, the cop lied and said my friend smacked him with a gun. He was in legal trouble for several months, and eventually court determined the cop was lying and the cop got a two-month suspension for it and the charges were dropped. A two-month suspension seems patheticly easy, since my friend was set to go to jail for several years if he was found guilty of "assault with a deadly weapon." He never tried to sue the cops for money though I think he should have. And during the fiasco he had to drop out of college, so lost his athletic scholarship, and never found the inspiration to go back. He just kind of lost it and has no interest in going to school or getting a good job - I think it's a heartbreaking situation. Take that story for what you will.)
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