Most jackpot winners end up back working after 5 years of winning millions. Why? Because people don't realize being rich aint about spending the money. its about keeping it, using it wisely, to someday create a virus and own the vaccine to make billions. these are what we call, newbs.

I know from personal experience what it is to be both homeless and to live on and off the streets. It’s a humbling and thought provoking and an introspective period as you seem trapped on the outside and fringes of society looking upon what you once knew and enjoyed and experienced and took for granted.

It’s an experience that opens your eyes to a lot of things, the injustices in the world, the indifference many people suffer, they folly of their ways, the folly of your ways that led you to such an impasse.

It leads to asking a lot of questions not only about the world you live in but a lot of questions about yourself and how you fit in to the world, as well as how you could and can fit in to the world.

I wasn’t homeless and out on the streets quite as much by true necessity but true pride and stubborn determination.

There were places I could have gone and people who loved me enough to want to help.

Yet I wanted to be in the geographical location I was, not in the geographical location those people were. I wanted to be in the philosophical location I was and not in the philosophical location those people were.

I wanted to find my own path, and simply put I decided the only way to do that was on my own.

Yet no person is an island and as I worked a part time job a few hours a day a few days a week and went to vocational school to develop a career to enhance my fortunes and give my life stability a few hours a day several days a week it was ultimately with some help of other people who found something appealing in my struggles and efforts that helped make the transition from homelessness and being out on the streets to a stable and profitable more enriching, safer and healthier life and lifestyle.

Yet one thing remains, I nonetheless learned to survive in harsh conditions on my own terms and to learn a true self reliance and true self responsibility. I learned and incorporated those lessons and as difficult as the learning environment may have been I have always felt all the better off for learning those lessons.

Americans have in my humble opinion Jake become so dependent upon its corporations and government and religious institutions to sustain us and provide for us it has left us not just vulnerable, not just enslaved but totally hostage to those institutions whims. Those corporations and the government and the religious institutions have clearly demonstrated time and time again it is their own and each others interest that they place first and foremost and not the average citizen’s.

Tragically, frighteningly Jake people keep looking to the corporations and governments and religious institutions to change this. Instead of becoming less reliant upon these institutions and looking for ways to be self reliant and independent of these institutions they want more than ever to desperately play into the hands of these corrupt self serving institutions in the all to apparent unrealistic hope that these institutions are at some immediate point in the future are going to become responsive to and responsible for the citizens instead of themselves and one another.

People who are unemployed and failing and falling on hard times need to look more to them selves and to reinvent themselves in a way that allows them to be independent or less reliant, and dependent upon and subservient too these failed institutions that continually, willfully and callously fail the citizen without compunction as they strive to always serve their own interests and each other institution’s interest instead of the citizen.

People, who can’t find jobs need to learn how to create a business off of a product or service they can make, provide or render independently. The going might be slow and tough, but a little of something is better than a whole lot of nothing. People who can’t find homes or shelter or sustenance and work need to look towards those fellow citizens who truly care and we as citizens need to start caring more about those around us who are in need.

We need to break our dependence on and addiction to systems and institutions that fail and abuse us. Wal-Mart has saved people money, at the cost of a whole lot of American Jobs. In other words they haven’t saved this nation a thing, they have hurt this nation. They have earned and saved themselves a whole bunch of money by pandering this illusion. The other big corporations and banks have done the same. The pennies in saving and the seconds saved through convenience haven’t served us well as average people, but served them well as mega-corporations that have driven out the small independent business person who offered an honest days wages for an honest days work.

Americans need to reinvent these small business and entrepreneurial spirit and enterprise driven into near extinction by the convenience of a slightly lower price, an easy place to park, easy credit terms and one stop shopping that has turned such monopolies into dictatorial and enslaving powers in their own right.

We can keep playing into the hands of these institutions by thinking our involvement with them on their terms and rules is going to change them for the better for us.

Or we can start shunning these institutions in our hours of greatest need who are in fact not there for us but simply to take advantage of us and profit off of us and once again become what Americans once were before big government and big corporations and a politically correct nanny state dominated the landscape.

Hard working, individual, self reliant, self determining people willing to create something of value from the fruits of our own thoughts and labors to offer to others on our own terms for our own individual and collective good is what America once was all about and had made it previously so great.

Necessity friend Jake is the mother of all invention. Never has the necessity been greater for so many Americans to reinvent themselves. To become self reliant, to become responsible, to return to thinking with common sense instead of political correctness for the benefit of themselves and the nation and all those who live in it is more than anything what these very difficult and disturbing times call for.

I know this can be done Jake as that is exactly what I did myself while sleeping on the cold ground, struggling to keep myself clean and presentable and fed, while focused on learning skills and capabilities that could make me more self reliant, without having a home of my own, or a warm safe place to hang my hat or bed down for the night.

I have worked for myself by myself in business for myself since 2003. The main reason I was tired of my fortunes being tied to the companies I worked for. When they went out of business, there went my paycheck.

Times are tough for me now like many other people, business is way down, but I still do business, and I can still rely on my business, because I control the quality of its output and product.

These are all things I have learned and come to believe in resolutely through my own long ago struggles with homelessness and poverty. I don’t lament that I had to learn these things in such desperate circumstances, in fact I celebrate the fact that I learned them, and what I learned I can share. We all should.

Great thread Jake, Star and Flag.



[edit on 31/10/09 by ProtoplasmicTraveler]

I am sorry his bad choices left him homeless.

I just have a very hard problem feeling TOO bad for someone who had 2.2 million and stupidly burned though it in a few years.

Had he been intelligent and saved his money, he would be living comfortably.

I know If I had 2.2 million, I would not be homeless in a few years.