Class Warfare

I live in a place where you can shape your own destiny. There are ladders to success that even the poorest among us can take to go wherever and be whatever we decide to be. That is precisely why the American experiment worked. People had the right to choose to succeed and that choice made all the difference.

Oprah Winfrey (born January 29, 1954) was born into poverty in rural Mississippi to a teenage single mother and later raised in an inner-city Milwaukee neighborhood. She experienced considerable hardship during her childhood, claiming to be raped at age nine and becoming pregnant at 14; her son died in infancy. Sent to live with the man she calls her father, a barber in Tennessee, Winfrey landed a job in radio while still in high school and began co-anchoring the local evening news at the age of 19. Her emotional ad-lib delivery eventually got her transferred to the daytime-talk-show arena, and after boosting a third-rated local Chicago talk show to first place, she launched her own production company and became internationally syndicated. According to Forbes, in September 2010 Winfrey was worth over $2.7 billion.

Steven Paul Jobs was born in San Francisco on February 24, 1955 to two university students, Joanne Carole Schieble of Swiss Catholic descent and Syrian-born Abdulfattah "John" Jandali (عبدالفتاح جندلي‎), who were both unmarried at the time. Jandali, who was teaching in Wisconsin when Steve was born, said he had no choice but to put the baby up for adoption because his girlfriend's family objected to their relationship. The baby was adopted at birth by Paul Reinhold and Clara Jobs, an Armenian American whose maiden name was Hagopian. Paul Jobs was a machinist for a company that made lasers and taught his son rudimentary electronics and how to work with his hands. The father showed Steve how to work on electronics in the family garage, demonstrating to his son how to take apart and rebuild electronics such as radios and televisions. As a result, Steve became interested in and developed a hobby of technical tinkering. He landed a summer job picking apples while he was in school and that became the inspiration for the garage-business that he and Steve Wozniak formed which became Apple Computers.

I picked two people, one of African descent, another of Swiss-Syrian descent (very near to my age) who started off life in the usual way, unremarkable and unheralded. There are many like them. But they were not the victims of CLASS WARFARE. They chose to succeed. And in this place that I call home, they succeeded. They were not nurtured in some socialist hell-hole where "we're all the same" and "you didn't build that" were the mantras of the day.  Neither of these people allowed themselves victims of circumstance.

There are destructive elements in my society who call themselves "progressive" and they promote class warfare based on envy. But envy didn't make Oprah Winfrey and Steve Jobs (and so many others) the success stories that they became. The simple freedom to rise or fall, to succeed or fail made them.

The "Progressive Movement" is completely shameless in the sense that they will never ever, for as long as they can possibly get away with it, going to admit to bad behavior. And in those rare cases where they simply cannot wiggle and maneuver and lie and deceive; or self-righteously tell you how wonderful they really are and all the wonderful things they have done; they will simply pretend they are still virtuous and have been victimized in some way.

And that is why I will NOT vote for Barack Obama in the upcoming presidential election.