Should We With Vision Loss Ignore and Forgive?

I strongly believe I was discriminated against in my working career.    

Was management responsible for the discrimination or was it fellow employees?   Did I seek help?

Discrimination is the act of making unjustified distinctions between human beings based on the groups, classes, or other categories to which they are perceived to belong.  People may be discriminated against based upon disability, race, gender, age, religion, or sexual orientation.  Discrimination can occur because of their actual or perceived affiliation with certain groups or social categories.  Discrimination can also occur if a person who has been discriminated against is seen as not fitting the profile. 

Because I did do OK in life, it seemed I was not entitled to any consideration as to whether or not I was actually discriminated against.  Regardless of how hard I worked to prove myself, I still faced these issues.  If I had to judge the reasons my pleas went unheard, I could conclude from various people that I would have been much better off in life if I would have just accepted my restrictions, lived within these limitations, and not try so hard to prove myself. 

I derived this document after a lengthy conversation I had with my former college classmate and longtime friend Jim who lives in Cleveland, Ohio. 

Like many college educated men who had vision loss, he could only find a job working for the government.   His job was at an Army base as a civilian logistics analyst – a job he could never be fired from.  His career started after college and continued until he could retire after 30 years with a $60,000 a year pension and full health benefits.  He also built significant wealth from over 35 rental houses and apartment buildings he owned.  He did little else in life except work at the base and build up his business. 

While I was out trying to integrate into normal society, he lived on the fringes redoing and renting living spaces in lessor parts of Cleveland.  He didn’t do the real-estate thing alone, rather he hired a good crew he could depend upon. 

As for his eyesight, in college he had enough sight such that he could just about read printed text in a book.  He could also see well enough to not require a cane to get around.  However, his vision continued to deteriorate as he got older.  He was born with congenital glaucoma which eventually left him totally blind.  He never married because as he put it, most sighted women were not interested.  This limited him to blind women.  But by the time he thought about marriage, most were already married. 

Anyway, marriage was not a high priority for Jim.  Instead, he concentrated on his business.  Today he is rather wealthy.  However, if he were to add up all the time he spent on his business, it in no way returned the value it could have.  Instead, this was more of a hobby to him which he enjoyed.  It also allowed him to retain a number of his workers who still take care of him, including taking him shopping, to the doctor, etc. 

Point Here

Jim did accept his limitations in life.  He did make the best of it.  However, his is a bit of a lonely life.  The only people that come around to see him is his workers.  Even though he does have brothers and sisters, they are not people who regularly come to visit, which is OK with Jim.  

He clearly knows his limitations and doesn’t try to push back against them.  He has accepted this – which is what I am now trying to do in my life.   I suppose my voluntary early retirement in 2015 meant that I too was starting to accept my limitations.  It’s just that I was quite upset all the while I was trying to accept this.  It has taken some time for me to get over my anger.   That’s why I kept a low profile for so many years. 

Preamble

I cannot address discrimination towards those of African ancestry and the hurt these people had to endure.  I also cannot address the discrimination towards others who have gender identity difficulties, the deaf, women, the chair-bound, etc.  But from my somewhat unique prospective, I can address issues that people with vision loss experience. 

The Basics

A very large percentage of people in the United States who have significant vision loss^[1] and are of working age are living on a monthly Social Security stipend.  Main cause: Discrimination.

In the light of our enlightened social justice society, what has improved for the blind since the inception of Braille and Talking Book recordings?   Only one thing: a PC computer can read aloud to the blind enabling them to do anything a sighted person can do with said PC.  However, nothing else has improved in their lives.

For example, does a blind person have the ability to freely and safely walk about without the assistance of a cane?  Do they have access to a car that can drive itself?  What percentage of working age blind are legitimately^[2] hired by the private sector?  These and other questions remain unanswered because … the conditions of the blind are of a very low priority.  How will socialism reduce this discrimination?

My Story of Discrimination

In 2014, I left the last employment of my career at Net Logistics^[3].  I was a computer programmer which was my occupation for 39 years.  In 2015, I filed for Social Security Retirement and Medicare, one year before my full retirement age of 66.  I haven’t worked since. 

My thoughts recently have been about the examination of my life.  I’ve had a lot of time to think about a lot of things since I left my job in 2014.  Since then, I’ve been occupied most of the time with my various technical projects and redoing the house I and my wife have been living in since 2009.

But, with the COVID-19 situation and the lockdown, I went through a period of anger and depression, which didn’t help my wife and my relationship.  This building of resentment had its basis with issues in my career and discrimination. 

I felt really disappointed that I couldn’t progress in my career as far as I should have been able to. This was due mostly to people’s perceptions as it was related to my competency.  I always knew this was solely due to my vision impairment.  It wasn’t because I had 29% of the eyesight of my fellow coworkers, rather because of their reactions to their preconceptions of supposed inabilities. 

Swept Under the Rug – Historically, I took it

In the 39 years I was working, I accepted other’s criticisms and I let these things slide.  Basically, I ignored or accepted their attitudes, both underlying and some brazen.  Over the years, I grew used to mentally hunkering down instead of reacting negatively towards them.  I supposed I feared reprisals such as being fired. 

On a new job, things would start off amicably and cordial.  But soon, people would discover there was something not quite right about me.  In order for me to do my work, I had to sit much closer to the PC monitor than the norm.  A “normal person” sits an average of 24 inches from their PC monitor.  I, on the other hand, had to sit about 7 inches from the screen, much closer than the norm.

As people discovered my malady, they changed their tune as they attempted to converse with me.  Their tone would slightly change from normal conversation between men to an attitude as though they were talking to someone who had some kind of mental defect.  When I would ask a question, they responded as if I was slow.  Regardless of my normal technically informed questions, they would continue as if I wasn’t catching on.  It’s hard for me to describe.  Their voice was softer and a little higher in pitch.  Then when talking to others, they would return to their normal voice. 

The situation often declined to the point that, when there were conversations with fellow peers, it would involve them talking to me in a loud voice as if I were deaf.  This is analogous to people trying to talk to a foreign person who doesn’t quite understand English.  A lot of people naively feel this need to raise their voice, believing this would enable the non-English speaking person to understand what it is they are trying to say.  This phenomenon is what gives Americans^[4] who travel abroad a bad reputation. 

In my case, it seems fellow coworkers were seemingly trying to involve everyone else in the room.  This was readily apparent as they stood back away from my desk loudly talking to me while looking around the room. 

Another attribute people had was to respond to a technical question I had by belittling me or joking around.  They usually did this if they were within earshot of fellow coworkers.  If they were alone, they didn’t display this tendency.  Rather they either said they were busy or they did attempt to answer my question. 

Then there were people who would respond to my questions with loud angry charges of impropriety.  “You don’t have permission to access that data!” – when in reality the specs said I had to access this data to do the job – specs that were written by the person charging me with impropriety.

There were people who blatantly joked about my vision loss.  One incident was where a fellow passed by my desk and then suddenly stopped.  He bent towards me and quietly said, I see nose prints on your screen. 

There was another person who always had to comment on my posture at the screen.  This company encouraged its employees to volunteer for various activities in the community.  One of these involved a woman who went to a managed care facility to teach the elderly how to use a PC.  On one particular day, the woman was telling everyone in the office about her experiences with teaching several people how to use the mouse.  She described that these people weren’t used to seeing a screen and locating the mouse pointer.  The fellow sitting next to her asked if they might be blind.  He then asked, “Are they as blind as Mike… (me)?” 

There were other even more blatant incidents that did occur.  As a result, I did seek the advice of several attorneys including one that was married to a fellow who himself had a vision loss.  Their response was that these types of discrimination are very difficult to prove and fighting these would probably drain away all my worldly wealth, what little I had. 

I think the realization of how bad discrimination was in my life occurred when a watershed event blasted me into reality.  This was when I was asked to return for an interview at the first company I worked for when I first moved back to Cleveland in 1987. 

This was a company called Cleveland Computer Systems Inc.^[5]  With the onslaught of the PC, I was laid off in 1993 – because the company stated they were a mainframe company, hence they refused to adopt this new technology.  I did return in 1994 for a six month contracting gig. 

My overwhelming enlightened realization involved an interview with a man who was, so-to-say, fresh off the boat from Belgium.  This fellow named Guy (/ɡaɪ/, French: [ɡi], homonym Ghee) was hired to manage the company’s endeavor to migrate into the PC architecture. 

I was called into the interview through my contract recruiter.   Evidently Guy saw some work I did for the company and he liked what he saw.   His programming background was similar to mine in that both he and I developed programs using the C language.  Sometime after I first started with the company, I had developed a rather sophisticated report writer.  This software package allowed the user of the company’s system to easily develop their own custom reports which saved the company from having to develop hundreds of individual reports. 

When I was called into the interview, I expected to be asked a bunch of technical questions.  Instead, after we introduced ourselves, Guy immediately asked me, “When can you start?”  I momentarily stood there a bit surprised and then responded, “I will be finishing my current contract this Friday.  I can start on Monday.”  He said, “Good.”  Then he said he wanted to tell me something.  He beckoned me to sit down. 

Guy then told me that there were people at the company who absolutely didn’t want me to return to work for the company.   I sat there speechless.  He then went on to explain that, among other things, those people said it was because of how I looked at things, how I looked at people.  He said they were annoyed by how I moved my head back and forth as I looked at someone – all things I could not help. 

There were other things including people who had considerable difficulty in understanding the report writer I had developed.  I sat there stunned.  I thought about getting up and leaving.  But Guy said that his manager told him that the company needed me to work on a critical part of the PC based system.  Guy then said that he would look out for me. 

I did accept the job.  I worked with mostly people from India, Spain, and Mexico who were highly intelligent and who easily accepted me.  It was as if I was born again.  I was in my element.  These people were kind and friendly and we did things after hours together. 

Those people from what I call the old guard were in other parts of the building.   I would have worked there until retirement except the old guard eventually forced Guy and these people out of the company.  As they did this, they started taking over the project.  Three years later, the Y2K fiasco happened and I was the first to be laid off. 

It seemed the older I got, the more proliferating the abuse.  I think this was because the older I got, the more I wanted out of life, hence, the harder I worked to prove myself.

Trump Lost Big Time

Strangely enough, my anger during COVID was aggravated by the Democrats winning the election.  I understood that, at times, people felt Trump didn’t appear presidential and he made many seemingly stupid gaffs on Twitter.  But I felt a lot of the Washington elite were, shall we say, not “presidential” class people either. 

Most will disagree with me about what it was Trump was trying to accomplish.  His trouble was, the greater political establishment was and is far too entrenched to ever change.  Also, far too many people of the US are heavily invested in nationalizing socialism.  The majority of voters now believe it is the role of government to be a major part of our lives.  As retirees living on SSR and Medicare, I suppose I have to include my wife and myself as well.  We are now significantly dependent upon government.

On the other side of the isle, there are far too many people who don’t have everyone’s best interest at heart.  These are not necessarily business owners, rather they include common men and women.  

The reason I got upset about the elections was because I listened to almost every speech Trump ever gave.  However, what others said he said was not what I heard him say.

As for Trump himself, I wasn’t really a fan of the Trumpster.  I just didn’t want the Democrats to win.  I saw what happened during the Carter years as well as during Clinton and Obama. 

In 2016, the country was in real trouble.  The US bond rating was downgraded, the economy was stagnating and companies continued outsourcing or leaving in droves for other less expensive countries.  I figured it would take a hardline bully like Trump to clean up the mess in Washington, keep taxes low, and to encourage business prosperity – which did happen.  Prices for most things remained really low including heat for our home, the cost of groceries and gasoline. 

Take This Job and Shove It

As for my work, my hurt in life seldom if ever came from bosses and managers; rather it was from my fellow comrades.  They were the ones who wanted to get rid of me.  At one time in the early 90s when I was living in a trendy part of Cleveland, a fellow^[6] of African ancestry I once knew asked, “Why didn’t you just nigger^[7] down, give-in and accept?” 

The answer I gave him was conclusively and absolutely because no human being need be at the mercy of another.  Be those of a differing heritage, confined to a wheel chair, have vision loss, or be lesbian, gay or transgendered^[8], we as human beings who are living in the freest society in the world deserve and are entitled to be treated with respect as stated by law.  Anyone who wields hatred or power over another for their own inadequacies is assuming tactics similar to those used by Nazis.  He then stood there quietly for a moment and then slowly nodded his head.  I’m sure he too wanted the same in his life – respect and acceptance.

Over the years I was, shall we say, able to take it.  But I feel deep hurt for my brethren who’ve suffered needlessly at the hands of others.  This is why I wrote this!  I wanted to tell everyone that, even though I as a middle class suburbanite who did make it ok, there were and are countless souls who didn’t make it, who in the end took it and, shall we say, felt they had to n------r down. 

It was my coworkers who needlessly gave me a hard time for the sake of their own shortcomings.  I felt these people would never be held accountable for their actions.  Instead, we honor them for their appearance and measured choice shallow words. 

These are the majority of the people I had to work with.  These are the people who did and are shaping our world.  These are not necessarily managers, but everyday people who vote, work, and play all around us.  These are the people who directly or indirectly hurt so many other people who appeared to them as less than.

Again, these are not necessarily people who’ve built businesses or who agonized under the stress of making critical decisions that could affect so many other lives.  Instead, it’s most everyone else – voters, workers, programmers, nurses, etc. – you and me.  Why do people discriminate?  Why do we do what we do?  Why!!!!

Well first of all, it must be understood that most people hate their work, their jobs.  To quote someone I once knew who worked in the construction trades, “Hey bud, it’s work!  It’s a damn^[9] job!”  They stressed this in response to my enthusiasm as I tried to talk with them about the neat things they did in their profession.  

I had restored over 5 houses in my life and I became rather proficient at most aspects of home construction.  These included framing, drywall, wiring, plumbing, gas piping, HVAC, kitchens and baths, etc.  So, it would stand to reason I found this fellow’s career to be rather interesting. 

Ever since the first PBS TV show of This Old House in the 70s, I’ve watched almost every episode.  I guess one might call construction another one of my hobbies.  Since 1975 when I bought my first home, my talents have since saved me a lot of money.   I came to understand what sweat equity is.

I often wondered how someone could do work every day they hated – 8 to 10 hours a day, or rather 2000 or more hours a year with only 86 hours of paid time off – for 40 years.  That’s well over half a person’s life!  Why didn’t they study, work up to or find jobs they loved? 

As for me, I thoroughly enjoyed my work.  Up until the last year of my working career, I got to do some really neat things.  But practically all my fellow peers didn’t really like their work - and as a consequence, this was reflected in the quality of what they did and their attitudes towards others. 

I would often start a new job in a team setting, but eventually I found that I was assigned work that no one else wanted.  Instead of moaning or quitting, I made the best of it.  I enjoyed the challenge.  I enjoyed making – and management loved me for it. 

However, even though I’ve proven myself time and time again, management felt the need to let me go rather than fire the rest of the team. 

I’m a Debt Free Kind-a-Guy

By the time I started my last job at Net Logistics in January 2007, my debts were all paid off for almost 6 years.  I was debt free; house and all. 

This quest for debt freedom came about in the late nineties when I became motivated to never borrow money again.  Chase decided to lose several of my credit card payments and charged me a bunch of interest and late fees.  At 28% plus exorbitant fees, that was a lot of money.   After several hours on the phone pleading with several people at a call center, I decided I never wanted to be beholden to these or any other people again. 

Back to Net Logistics

I was hired as a contractor.  Prior to that, I had been contracting for almost 7 years.  Well, I was contracting for a little more than half that time.  The rest of the time I did other things.  Computer technology was changing such that it was hard for a lot of people to keep up.  Also, there were layoffs of the Y2K glut of programmers, along with mass layoffs from economic downturns. 

Anyway, after about six months at Net Logistics, I was told by one of my enlightened colleagues that the company was not going to be renewing my contract.  So, being debt free with a decent cash reserve, I fearlessly started looking around. 

The Thursday before I was to leave and start my next gig…  The Daves, the two owners of the company, returned from a two week business trip to China.  Dave C, the operations VP, got wind of my leaving, and...  In the end, I was hired as an employee with benefits at double my hourly rate, the most I had ever earned in my career.  Again, being debt free, I wasn’t fearful when it came to negotiating a salary and extended vacation time.

For six years after that, I put up with the resentment of my fellow peers - until finally one of them was promoted to VP of IT…   At first, he just ignored me – for about six months.  In the end, the two Daves generously gave me a year’s severance to tide me over until my 65^th birthday when I could get Medicare. 

Through my coworker’s attitudes towards me and others like me, they were unwittingly pushing for Democratic Socialism even though they may have voted Republican. The point is, we will have National Socialism because of the short sidedness of so many people.  Even though the 2020 elections may have been compromised by voter fraud, mass media bias, and those with an overwhelming dependence on government, the majority of voters did vote their ideals.

I’ve accepted this.  My wife and I are and will be OK.  But, with the eventual rationing of healthcare, it is our goal to do what we can to stay healthy including healthy eating and ample exercise. 

Being a techno-nerd, the part I will find sad is innovation will be as it was during the Carter years.   I mean, how innovative is Canada, England, France, Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, etc., all so-called bastions of socialism.  It was the free entrepreneurial spirit of the US that allowed people to invent color TV, the PC, the Internet, the smart phone and the COVID Vaccine.

What I tried to say above about Trump is he didn’t necessarily lose because of fraud, media bias, etc.  I was saying it was because people were a bit lost and tired of all the shenanigans. 

I know, I too was tired.  That’s why I didn’t try to find another job in 2014 when I was let go.

Finally, I don’t think we would have had the COVID-19 pandemic if Trump hadn’t upset the Chinese.

The Point of All This

I don’t mean to sound as if I’m harboring contempt, but…  When I was having issues at my jobs with discrimination, I sought out and appealed to people I thought were sympathetic towards the, so-to-say, downtrodden.  Instead, they repeatedly blamed me for other’s reactions.  Recently, I asked several of them who they were voting for.  They predictably responded the Democrat.  I asked them why.  After some hemming and hawing, they finally expressed their concerns about those who were, well, downtrodden.  I then asked, “What about me?”  Their abrupt response was that I brought these problems onto myself.  The impression I took away from our conversations was, I didn’t need help because I made it.  Deeply encoded within the meaning of what they were saying was, I just needed to not have made it.  Also, my acceptance of my situation was imperative.

If I could, I would have worked until I was 70.   With our expenses being so low, I would have continued working building significant wealth.  Instead, my saintly wife felt she had to go to work – in a dirty factory earning $9.00 an hour with people of similar attitudes as those I had to work with. 

Today Almost 21 Years after Y2K

I’ve come to the realization that this discrimination did shape my perceptions of life.  Though I did consciously ignore people’s biases, the reality is I subconsciously adapted my personality in order to accommodate them.  By letting this happen, I must have shown people that I might have been incompetent.  My body language, my actions, and my decisions all must have made me appear as someone who was inept. 

This is a very common characteristic among people who’ve been oppressed.  To carry this burden around must have really affected people in ways they cannot see, but others could.  

My fight against this is a more recent occurrence.  It seemed to coincide with my return to Cleveland in 1987.  Also, the more beautiful, glamorous, glitzy and sophisticated the popular media gets, the more discriminating people get.  In 1987, we had 23 relatively innocuous cable TV channels.  Now we have thousands upon thousands of streams on hundreds of available feeds and forms portraying life in all its reality, shallowness, violence, etc.

Secluded Retirement

I’m having more fun than a guy should be allowed to have.  Maybe things did turn out OK for me. I suppose I should be glad they were pricks causing me to rethink working.  Also, my wife is now home with me with no more factory dirt in her life.

I have to admit though; I was really upset at being pushed out of the last job.  I miss all the hourly line workers^[10] and their managers who were all very good people and were really nice to me.  I made stuff that made their jobs much easier.  I never yelled at them, called them stupid computer users and I found they did have valid issues and concerns that were solvable.  

The basic fundamental point being: if my fellow workers did this stuff to me, what about others who were like me?  If the liberal thinker was as compassionate as they portrayed themselves to be, why did they blame me?  Instead, why didn’t they help? 

When we stack all these issues on top of each other, one can see why we as a country are heading towards centralized socialism.  People are just tired and want some kind of protection and guidance from government. 

In my life, I still held out hope for enlightenment and caring.  But now I’ve come to the realization, this may not be of this earth.  It seems we are here on this planet for a relatively short period of time.  I wanted to make the best of it – and I felt that I did.  I really do enjoy life.  But for me, it is a rarity to find people who feel the same.

A God Defined is a God Confined

There are no doubt those among you who are saying in essence, let go and let God.

I think the ultimate question I can ask myself is, is there a God?

If I had to determine whether there is or is not, based upon my associations with people, I would conclude that there is not.  From the time I was a child and sent to different schools than my 7 other brothers and sisters and put into an orphanage, to the countless times I sought out people of the Christian faith, I have to say I had no positive reinforcement as to whether or not there is a god. 

My childhood history was lined with the belief that I was a sinner and my soul could only be redeemed if I would fall into what others expected of me.  Those expectations were at best a convoluted mix of diverging demands given by people who themselves were very mixed up. 

In the 70s and 80s when I was far from the god people, I had the freedom to explore the human experience.   I then seemed to be free and unshackled, and maybe I became a bit cocky.  It was when I moved back to the city of my birth when things started to digress. 

Everything I had hoped for in Cleveland wasn’t here.  Instead, I faced a blinding reminder as to why I left in the first place.  Even after a nervous breakdown and moving to a different house, I still felt very lost.  From there I sought out God.  Instead of enlightenment from people of supposed spiritual guidance, I found ignorance and a lack of understanding. 

As for today, I strongly feel that all the matter that surrounds me and its billions upon billions of intricate molecular shapes, sizes, etc., could not have happened by accident.  I believe there must have been a designer far more brilliant than any thinking human individual or collective that has ever existed. 

To me, God is not something to be bought or sold.  God is not in a building.  God himself is not a way of life.  Basically, God is not definable.  What we do with God is accept and follow his teachings. 

Our way of life is to do good deeds.  We are here to have a balanced life where we can enjoy and give joy.  Life in balance.  Bending knee and praising God is not what the designers had in mind.  Humans are the only living entities on earth that were given intelligence.  It’s up to us to use our intellect. We‘ve gathered, analyzed and built an extensive knowledge base.  It is up to us to teach, learn, and use it for the betterment of all human kind.  That’s what I’ve strived to do my whole life.  That’s why God made us in his image.

~

Finally, I’m not sure I am sorry I had to say all of this.  Deep inside I was really upset and all I wanted to do was tell someone about this stuff.  I just wanted a tiny semblance of understanding.  If I as someone who did make it could get this for myself, then I feel this could also be given to my brethren who’ve suffered and never made it.  I am no different from them. 

I’m over being angry and I’m back to my unusual loveable self.  Ask my wife.  Lately, she has been rather affectionate with me.

Note 1.  Net Logistics filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy in February 2019 – way before the Pandemic.  This company started at the birth of ecommerce internet based retailing.  A year after they started, they couldn’t help but make money, it was that easy.  However, over the years of their growth, they embrace computer technology such that they felt they could design and develop systems without outside help.  As a consequence, they made many mistakes because they adopted the wrong platforms for their systems.  Also, poor designs and implementations, along with antiquated ideas made things worse. They had hired on board a person who worked for a power company that had old IBM batch architectures.  This alone required much more maintenance and support than today’s interactive based systems.  In the end, they spent tens of millions on revamping systems that ultimately consumed the majority of the company’s revenues.

When Net Logistics finally went belly up and their client base was sold off, hundreds of the hourly people and their managers were most likely put out of work. 

Of all the companies I’ve worked for in my 39 year career, MP Testing^[11] (the very first company I worked for in 1975 in my career field of Computer Science) is one of the two companies left in business – and is doing very well.  Working there was like family. 

CCS is still in business, but it is a fraction of its former size. 

Of course, I did work for a community college.  It’s still there.  It seems government never goes out of business.

Note 2.  In my 39 year working career, I never had the opportunity of working with someone who had a vision loss.  At one very large company I was contracted to, I did meet two fellows who were blind.  However, their job was merely to test and determine the usability of the accessibility option of this company’s online legal/news database systems. 

Note 3.  In my entire career of computer programming, there was only one person who actually enjoyed his work as much as I did.  He was a lanky fellow who was not only a systems genius, but could quickly pick up a new computer language in a matter of hours.  He would then become proficient at programming in that language within a week such that he could challenge a seasoned programmer who used that language for years.  From his tutelage, I also became adept at picking up new languages as well.  That’s why I succeeded at being a contract programmer during the tumultuous Y2K years of changing computer architectures.

Thought Food

This writing is my experiences.  However, if people take the interrelated collective things I’ve said, glom onto a piece of it and take that one thing out of context, then it won’t mean anything and will cease being applicable to me.  What I mean is, I have a strong feeling people will not read the whole document and see it for what it is meant to convey.  Instead, there are those who will find the least little thing they feel is wrong and point that out ignoring the rest.  Also, some will take personally what it was I have said here.

The exact thing happened to Trump – except the Media did the selective glomming for everyone.  In our superficial snippet oriented world, very few people actually listened to his speeches in their entirety.

That’s why we have the world as it is; people not willing to face their problems and do something about them.   Instead we waste time watching hours of mindless television that is attuned to the 13-year-old mentality.  We also discriminate and at the same time, we vote for social justice.  Go figure!

So anyway, I’m OK.  I’m working my way through the residuals from the ordeal of all this stuff. 

Take care,

M October 1^st 2020

P. S. In disclosing the Net Logistics bankruptcy, I pointed out in a roundabout way that people’s on-the-job attitude can dictate how well a company will do. 

As for the sentence with the “N” word above, I know this is a very politically inappropriate word.  However, I chose to use it to amplify how I was treated and how I felt.

When I recently reread Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, the original unedited version, I thought of the kind fellow who did ask me that question and how he felt in life.  Many of his friends who have African linage used that term to describe their hurt.  

I greatly dislike the separatist terms “black” and “White”.  We’re all genetically, morally and statutorily humans that deserve freedom and respect, and not to be herded into groups.

Oh, by the way.  Remember, everyone thinks I’m blind?  So, I must not see skin color.

I know, I’m not blind.  I see well enough to drive a car.  And, I grew up living among and going to school with many who were from diverse ethnicities.

Historically, socialism gives enough to survive on but discourages self-reliance.  Socialism does not give enough to lift oneself out of…  And, this has been a longstanding tradition of popular acceptance