Why poor is awesome!
There I was 19 years old and a father. I had a high school education and now 3 mouths to feed. I was poor. Let’s be honest though, I chose to be poor. You see at 19 these are the kinds of choices you make. You look in the mirror after rubbing one out and say, “Donviti, you want to be poor. Being poor are fun. Being poor are fine and dandy.” So to provide for my wife and child I decided to enter a life of servitude.
I joined the navy. The recruiters told me how much money I would be making. Holy shit! Are you kidding me? I thought to myself this is awesome! I am going to get paid almost $16k a year! Unreal! AWESOME. Don’t forget about 3 squares a day, great healthcare and a clothing allowance.
Then I went into the navy and as luck would have it had another child not long after my service of my country began. Luckily the insurance paid for the pregnancy and after care. It was rough, but I had to remember I chose to be poor and serve my country. Life was great really. I didn’t have a cell phone yet, but I had color TV and a washer and dryer.
Shortly after I got stationed on my boat the USS Minneapolis St. Paul I moved to Norfolk Va. You’d be surprised what $16k can afford down there! I had a palace. A 2 room apt that one night even provided for the most amazing view. What view Donviti, you ask? That would be the view of my neighbors pointing his AK-47 across the way to the guy in his window pointing his 9mm at him. After putting my wife and child in the tub, belly crawling to the phone, dialing 911 I moved out of that lap of luxury and into military housing.
My COB (chief of the boat) pulled some strings and got me into Sub Standard housing. That’s right; my navy had provided me with sub standard living. Living is so great that you practically get paid to live in a 4 room 800 sq foot house. AWESOME! The housing people even gave you free roach bombs and ant traps if you needed them. Can you imagine? Where else would you want to live? FREE FUCKING ROACH TRAPS, from the Navy!
Living poor was great. Hell IS great. After my wife plopped out our 2 child and I made E-3 I got nearly a $1200 raise! It was like hitting the lottery! Not for the $1200 raise though, for having another kid, we now qualified for Food Stamps and WIC. AWESOME! BEING POOR IS GREAT! I loved it, there was nothing like not being able to afford Enfamil, milk, cheese and stuff while signing up to die for my country.
I remember this one time my daughter was so sick we had to go to the hospital. Man how great was that to go to a Naval Hospital? Let me tell you it was awesome! My wife called me to tell me that my daughter couldn’t keep any food down and had a fever of like a 103. So off she went to get the best medical care my service could provide. I had her go to the hospital first and I met her there.
Man what a beautiful sight it was. As I walked into the hospital I couldn’t believe me own eyes! It was like walking into the hands of God. Now remember I was enlisted so we get the best treatment our service can buy. There was my wife holding my 8 month old daughter. Cradling her with an IV hanging out of her little arm. She was dehydrated and they were getting her all better. It was a beautiful image and one that I won’t easily forget. I won’t easily forget it because the “nurse” had to poke my daughter 8 times (before I got there) before she could find a vein. She was so dehydrated that her little veins were hard to find. She couldn’t get a good vein, but that was ok, because she used the sheet my daughter was wrapped in to wipe the blood off of her arm. The site of seeing my daughter in a diaper, no clothes because they took them off of her, wrapped in a bloody sheet was inspiring.
I was poor and being treated like a poor person. It was great! I loved it!
I choose to be poor after all, so I had to suck it up. Often times after standing in line at the local commissary I felt a swell of pride enter me as other Enlisted folk where reaching into their pockets for their food stamps. It was nice to have a brother in arms at checkout lane 15. With a subtle nod of the head, a click of the mouth we were brothers, we were poor and we LOVED it!
So after being on food stamps, wic and assisted living while serving my country I can honestly say that I would rather be poor any day over having money. It is so over rated.
After all the bible says the meek shall inherit the earth…
Yeah, enlisted pay sucks, no doubt about it.
Of course, I, too, lived in an 800-sq-ft house, but I had 3 kids stacked in one bedroom. And it wasn’t great, but it worked at the time. Oh, and I paid for my house.
I was an AF brat. My dad spent 21 years in the service and, amazingly, never complained about the ratty housing conditions we lived in. Funny, huh?
I wouldn’t say people necessarily choose to be poor, but they frequently make decisions that lead to poverty. Having children young and out of wedlock, not finishing school, and not keeping to a job are the biggest contributors to poverty, not joining the military.
amazingly, never complained about the ratty housing conditions we lived in.
I never complained in front of my kids either.
As usual DV is conflating two things that are separate issues:
1. People frequently make bad choices that lead to economic problems
2. The members of our military (esp. enlisted) are poorly paid and receive horrible health care.
huh? military people aren’t Poor duffy, just poorly paid and get horrible health care. Wow take out the military part of that sentence and that would define, gee I don’t know, POOR PEOPLE?
I don’t think I’m conflating the 2 at all actually.
If anything I’m giving a specific example of a “class” of people that are poor and shockingly serve our country.
So imagine poor people that don’t even have the benefits one does serving his/her country.
Luxury! We used to have to get out of the lake at six o’clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of hot gravel, work a twenty hour day at the mill for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would thrash us to sleep with a broken bottle, if we were lucky!
Oh, and I had all four impacted wisdom teeth taken out by an Army dentist. That seemed to go pretty well, especially when they pumped me full of perkys! I don’t know if I’d go back for a heart transplant, but I’d say the active military gets decent health care – it’s not until you go into the VA system that you start getting screwed over by civilian bureaucrats (see also HillaryCare.)
Serious question: Since our esteemed host has said that “get horrible health care,” and military health care is health care that precisely fits the single-payer system model (paid for entirely by the government, regulated entirely by the government, and provided by government employees), why does our host support the single-payer model of universal health care coverage?
G Rex, my (extended) family has had the wonderful experience of a service member’s wife, who had been previously diagnosed with a particular chronic condition, who had a file full of references to this condition, presenting herself at the Langley AFB hospital with an acute flare-up, and the physicians there being both unwilling to believe her when she said that she was having a flare-up, and being unable to diagnose her problem.
I’m pretty sure that we’ll soon wind up with some form of universal coverage, but it’ll mean that our health care will be rotten.
Do, I really don’t know very much about you, so I’ll just ask: are you still poor, or have you, through long efforts and hard work, worked your way out of poverty and into the middle class?
You see, I grew up poor. Oh, we always had a roof over our heads, but sometimes dinner was chicken noodle soup and peanut butter crackers, or, one of my mom’s specialties, “tuna stuff,” which was a can of tuna mixed in with cream of mushroom soup, served over crackers.
My mom managed to work herself out of poverty, though most of that happened after I had moved out. My wife and I were poor for a time as well, and we worked ourselves out of that as well. Sometimes people find themselves in poor circumstances, but the ability to work yourself out of poverty exists, and it is primarily the result of taking the good choices to work hard and not use drugs.
Serious question: Since our esteemed host has said that “get horrible health care,” and military health care is health care that precisely fits the single-payer system model (paid for entirely by the government, regulated entirely by the government, and provided by government employees), why does our host support the single-payer model of universal health care coverage?
not even close Dana. Military doctors are a far cry from what we would get in a single payer system.
“not even close Dana. Military doctors are a far cry from what we would get in a single payer system.”
Why? Because you said so? Wow. I will sleep so much easier now.
The truth is you have NOTHING to prove that a government run health care system will be just as good, while we see countless examples of government run systems that are CRAP. The false notion being floated by the left is “Well, we will look at the other systems, learn from their mistakes, and make ours better.”
Believe me. I am a huge believer that America can doing things better than most of the world, but the assertion is presupposing that a government run system can work. There lies the problem. We are not learning the biggest lesson of all from the other countries’ mistakes….that is that GOVERNMENT CAN”T RUN A HEALTH SYSTEM! And unlike those “oh so great” socialist countries, if we go to government run, we won’t have some great Superpower with a market based system driving all of our health research. In short, medical science will pretty much freeze right where it is.
Shame we couldn’t have found that cure for cancer first. Oh well, what’s 500,000 + deaths a year among socialists. Just means there is more healthcare pie to go around.
“Military doctors are a far cry from what we would get in a single payer system.”
You’re right, they’re much better than we’d get under socialized health care.
I never complained in front of my kids either.
My dad didn’t complain because we weren’t poor and he was grateful for what we had.
My dad knew real poverty, the kind where you go out hunting possums at night so you might have some meat in the dinner instead of just the crap the government was giving families during the Depression. My dad grew up in a wood shanty with a fire in the middle of the room, no running water and barely any food. He really did hike over the mountains in the dark to make the bus that took them into town to school.
He wound up joining the Army and never graduated from high school. He was 5 ft. 10 and weighed 119 lbs. Most people would call that malnourished. And while other G.I.s bitched about the food the Army served, my dad ate all they’d give him because he knew what it was like to not have enough to eat.
So, my dad didn’t complain about our ratty taxpayer-paid-for house not because he was noble. He did it because real poverty is much worse.
poverty is relative sharon. People shouldn’t have to experience poor like people did 30 years ago. That makes no sense.
Poor people are poor people shame on you for trying to glaze over it.
People today are poor.
You sound like an old curmedgeon or something.
Did you walk to school up hill both ways? In the snow up to your shoulders with nothing but cardboard on your feet?
spare me…
I guess you aren’t a christian either. sad