Starting with "Nothing"

The problem with the 1% is that they are so far up, they cannot see down. For instance, there is hardly a one of them but does not think that they have "earned" their money, and so they think that instead of any of us complaining, we should do that too.

The problem with that is that while yes, many of them have worked, and yes, some have even worked "hard", that they are taking for granted some pretty important ingredients to success that have nothing to do with their "work".

They are correct in only one thing. A person who works hard is going to be better off than another person, who in the same situation, does not work hard.

They are wrong in forgetting that there are a great many situations out there, though.

If we were to take identical twins and place one in Somalia and one in the United States, none of us have much trouble realizing that one twin is going to do far better than the other, even with them both working just as hard.

And even within a given nation, if we took identical triplets, and one was raised in a poor trailer court, another in a middle class suburb and another in Donald Trump's childhood neighborhood, then those three - in spite of each working equally hard - are going to have very different results.

The 1% are thus people who born within 10 feet of the mountain top have climbed that 10 feet and are now looking at those of us half way down the mountain - or even in the valley - and yelling, "We climbed up on our own, so that proves that anyone can!"

And yet some of us have climbed a good deal more than ten feet, and are thus a bit peeved to hear that. I mean, gee, we're glad they climbed that ten feet, that's great, some of them don't climb or even drop back down, so that's all cool. But it's just ten feet.

And when many of us have had to climb 1,000 feet just to get to the level of where an evening with a bag of McDonald's and renting a movie are a "treat", we don't need to hear from the 1% about how it was their hard work that made them what they are!
 

Worse than that, though, is those who so far up in the clouds, have forgot there is even such a thing as a valley, and thus equate wherever they started as "the bottom". Such a blind one recently like the son of Donald Trump, Eric, who assured us that his father started out with virtually "nothing".

You know, because Donald "only" had four years of college and a million dollar loan from his father Fred.

In some ways, I can place myself in Eric's $500 shoes and "get it". Eric probably knows plenty who were gave a cushy job where they could draw a large salary for no real work, or just gave control in an up and running company, or were gave some seventy plus million dollar loan to play with! And there's then his poor dad who "only" got that college education and a million bucks!

Yet, in truth, I could only "get" where Eric was coming from if that was the case - and I'd still think he was a bit naive for not realizing that most don't count college (at Wharton!) and a million bucks as "nothing".

But funny thing, Donald Trump actually did have a cushy job at his dad's company while going to college, and it paid him enough to have $200,000 by the time he graduated in 1968. He then was gave control of his dad's up and running company.

And ten years later, when he claims he started to do it on his own? Oh, he got a million dollar loan from his dad all right, but what Eric forgot to mention was that his dad then arranged for him to get an additional SEVENTY million dollar loan from a bank that Fred had a relationship with.

So not only did Trump not start from "nothing" as we among the Top Ramen class would reckon it, he did not even start from "nothing" as the over-privileged would reckon it.

This isn't just a Republican thing, don't get me wrong. There's not a Presidential candidate out there that doesn't love to pretend that he was born in a log cabin that he (or she) built with their own hands!

The Clintons have long loved to pretend about their down home roots, as if all the poor folk in Arkansas are Rhodes Scholars. And Chelsea - well, we all are aware of just how valuable Chelsea is to a network wishing to curry favor with a Secretary of State.

Here's the thing that Donald and Eric and Hillary and Chelsea and all the other children and grandchildren of privilege need to stop doing. Stop claiming in any sense that they started with "nothing".

The kid who joins the military because there are no better options - he starts with nothing. The kid who goes to community college on loans and then can only get a McJob upon graduation - he starts with nothing. The kid who starts at the factory his dad works at, and it closes and moves to Mexico five years later - he starts with nothing.

(And heck, even those people aren't truly starting with "nothing" as some over in Somalia could tell us!)

So whether a guy is a billionaire, a millionaire, or "just" some upper-middle class doctor, dentist or lawyer, the whole "started from nothing" thing probably needs to be put away. Because it doesn't fly. And just annoys those who really are far closer to "nothing" then they were.