My Burger-Flipper Story

I saw this piece from a research project connected to United Way (ALICE Project).

Basically....51 million households cant make enough to afford what it costs in their town or area on housing, food, child care, health care, transportation and a cell phone.  It adds up to 43-percent of families in the nation....if you believe it.

I paused over this for a while.  It's a bit difficult to believe.

Course, if you marginally finished high school, and ten years later.....are still flipping burgers at McDonalds, cutting grass for the city parks department, or working at the school as the junior-junior janitor....then it's not that shocking.  You probably are still living in the basement of your dad's house with your girlfriend, and you have a sixteen-year old Ford for transportation.

Each time this United Way story gets told....people ought to stand up and ask them to introduce the the guy and his family that fell into this 'square peg'.  Most folks will ask questions....wanting to know what you did in high school, and how you failed to proceed on in life.  The term 'loser' might be uttered a bit.

I grew up in the 1970s in Alabama, and came to note various characters in the local area that you'd consider a loser.  Most were living in 'shacks' that had running water, a toilet, and had a 1950s pick-up.  No, they had no phone or health insurance.  No, they didn't have health care.  If you brought up the topic....you'd usually find out that most dropped out of high school around the ninth grade, and their only real job in life was cutting timber or changing tires.

The thing is that we had enough tire jobs and timber jobs to keep these people occupied and surviving. Today?  You've got thousands of these people around urbanized areas, and we've pretty well saturated the burger-flipper profession and filled just about every single timber job possible.

Yes, in some ways....we've reach a point where 'being all you can be' or getting ahead in life.....is not exactly the goal of maybe four out of every ten folks. Those four folks are aspiring to fill burger-flipper jobs and we've maxed out.  And these people can't move on.

What now?  If you can't invent more burger-flipper jobs....we are basically doomed.