So how exactly did this happen?

[myDeaconmyhand]

Government assistance. Call it whatever you would like. It's a reality for a lot of folks just trying to get by.[/QUOTE

Oh, I missed that one. We come from two different mindsets and were thinking about two different types of benefits. I was thinking about job-related benefits. You were thinking about welfare benefits. Silly me. I should have known. No reason to take a job as long as the government will take care of you.

Sounds like someone who's been fortunate enough his whole life to never need government assistance. I'm glad for you.

 

[wakephan09]

Enter the dishonest deflection already in progress, supra and infra.

It's a small wonder that the working class is more skeptical of the benevolence bestowed on them by Elite Dems, isn't it?

For those keeping score at home, this post is definition #pretentious.

Also nonsense.

 

[bobknightfan]

Sounds like someone who's been fortunate enough his whole life to never need government assistance. I'm glad for you.

Fortunate? Yeah, I was fortunate....though I didn't come from a blue-blood family like many of the kids at WF today with these prices. We never had much when I was growing up...but I did have two loving parents who instilled in me the right values and a work ethic. My dad worked in the Worthville cotton mill until I was 8 years old, when he and three other local guys were able to get a job as blue-collar machinists at the Western Electric Pomona Plant in Greensboro. To save on expenses, they car-pooled the 20 miles each way to work for the next 20 years....each one driving every 4th week. He never made more than $7,500/year in his life. I had jobs bagging groceries & delivering newspapers on my bicycle when I was a kid, worked every summer when I was at Wake, then took a job a month after I graduated...and have been working ever since. I've mentioned this before, but I never had a car during the entire four yeas I was at WF. If I wanted to make the 45-mile trip home on a weekend (which I seemed to want to do as often as possible, as I was dating a girl there who is now my wife of more than 48 years), I thumbed home unless I was lucky enough to have a relative come to pick me up. I couldn't begin to count how many times I caught a ride to downtown W-S with a guy on the campus, then walked down the ramp to I-40 there at the Downtowner Motor Inn on Cherry Street & thumbed the 26 miles to Greensboro on I-40 & the 20 miles down to Randleman on highway 220. Let's see a show of hands here. How many posters went through their entire four years at WF without a car? If I had more than $5 in my pocket at any given time while I was at Wake it was an unusual situation.

My point here is that there are many people who have not had it that easy at times in their lives. It is how you deal with those situations that separates those people and is the best indicator of who will rise above their difficulties and those who will fail to do so. Liberals can downplay the importance of a stable family unit in life if they wish, but I think that the breakdown of the nuclear family is probably the single biggest problem we have in this country today.

 

[BarcaDeac]

your girlfriend was in Randleman your entire time at Wake?

 

[warak]

My point here is that there are many people who have not had it that easy at times in their lives. It is how you deal with those situations that separates those people and is the best indicator of who will rise above their difficulties and those who will fail to do so. Liberals can downplay the importance of a stable family unit in life if they wish, but I think that the breakdown of the nuclear family is probably the single biggest problem we have in this country today.

why do you think it is liberals that are downplaying this? Red states have the higher rates of single mother with children households (per https://www.statista.com/statistics...-single-mother-households-in-the-us-by-state/). You blame it on the liberals but the first Blue state (NY) is #16 on the list, all above are the usual RED states...hypocrite!

 

[bobknightfan]

your girlfriend was in Randleman your entire time at Wake?

She was three years behind me. My senior year at Wake was her freshman year at UNC-G. So she was there for three of my 4 years at Wake. My first date with her was on July 31, 1963...just before I began my senior year in high school. She was very young, but her dad loved golf. (He was one of the 5 original owner-developers of the Pinewood Country Club below Asheboro, which was built in 1970 while I was in the army.) So I asked for an afternoon date to play golf at the Asheboro Municipal Golf Course. That trick worked....and the rest is history.

 

[wakephan09]

She was three years behind me. My senior year at Wake was her freshman year at UNC-G. So she was there for three of my 4 years at Wake. My first date with her was on July 31, 1963...just before I began my senior year in high school. She was very young, but her dad loved golf. (He was one of the 5 original owner-developers of the Pinewood Country Club below Asheboro, which was built in 1970 while I was in the army.) So I asked for an afternoon date to play golf at the Asheboro Municipal Golf Course. That trick worked....and the rest is history.

So you had a date with a recently graduated middle schooler when you were a rising senior in high school? Robbing the cradle, nice!

 

[Maurice]

So you had a date with a recently graduated middle schooler when you were a rising senior in high school? Robbing the cradle, nice!

A violation of the dating age formula, no doubt. One that worked out, so kudos to them.

 

[jhmd2000]

So you had a date with a recently graduated middle schooler when you were a rising senior in high school? Robbing the cradle, nice!

Another successful two parent household. The statistics win again.

 

[bobknightfan]

So you had a date with a recently graduated middle schooler when you were a rising senior in high school? Robbing the cradle, nice!

Yep. I was also President of the Student Body & captain on the basketball team.....and more than 53 years later we are still together. As Maurice said, it has seemed to work out very well for us.

ETA: My wife might still make people think I was robbing the cradle, as she has kept her youthful look over the years. At 5'3" & 98 lbs, she can still wear her wedding dress. I couldn't say that about the suit I wore that night.

 

[simosfrostyone]

Bob, what were your BB stats? Were you a high motor guy, gym rat and like a coach on the floor?

 

[bobknightfan]

Bob, what were your BB stats? Were you a high motor guy, gym rat and like a coach on the floor?

Averaged 14 PPG & made All-Conference my senior year, but it was a very different game back in those days. Much more slow-paced and less athletic, as most teams walked the ball up the court and saw lots of zone defense with very little physical play. We would have gotten killed by today's high school teams. Final scores were usually in the 40s or 50s. I was left-handed and my coach constantly tried to get me to work on using my right hand, but because of the style of play I was never really forced to do it. (Another one of those deals when you are young & think you know more than the coach.) If I had not been so hard-headed I could have been a lot better. Remember one game during my junior year when I scored 9 points in the first 4 minutes of the 1st quarter as the other team was playing a soft 2-1-2 zone and giving me wide-open shots (a lot like WF does this year). I thought I was going to score 30 points that night. Then the other team called a timeout and switched to a box-and-one with a guy playing me a half step to my left. I ended that game with 9 points. Still, I was offered a partial scholarship at a JC, but my heart was set on going to WF from the time I was in the 6th grade. (Didn't even apply to any other colleges.) Briefly thought about trying to walk-on for the WF Freshman team. Wake was in a down period and I think that Jim Boshart may have been the only full scholarship guy in my class, so with 12-15 players on the Freshman team there were lots of walk-ons that year. Finally decided that I really didn't have a future with that and going from a small high school to a place like Wake Forest I would have my hands full with my studies....and even if I had made the Freshman team I would have probably just sat on the bench most of the time. Slow 6' guards weren't that much in demand, even then. LOL.

 

[PhDeac]

Good response to the discussion we were having earlier this week about jobs Americans won't do. More specifically, men particularly white less educated men are reluctant to go to school and/or pursue jobs they consider women's work.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/01/0...&smtyp=cur&_r=0&referer=http://m.facebook.com

“The jobs being created are very different than the jobs being eliminated,” said David Autor, an economist at M.I.T. “I’m not worried about whether there will be jobs. I’m very worried about whether there will be jobs for low-educated adults, especially the males, who seem very reluctant to take the new jobs.”
Take Tracy Dawson, 53, a welder in St. Clair, Mo. He lost several jobs, some because his employers took the work to China and Mexico and others because the workers were replaced by robots. He has heard the promises of fast-growing jobs in the health care field: His daughter trained to be a medical technician. But he never considered it.
“I ain’t gonna be a nurse; I don’t have the tolerance for people,” he said. “I don’t want it to sound bad, but I’ve always seen a woman in the position of a nurse or some kind of health care worker. I see it as more of a woman’s touch.”

Much of men’s resistance to pink-collar jobs is tied up in the culture of masculinity, say people who study the issue. Women are assumed to be empathetic and caring; men are supposed to be strong, tough and able to support a family.
“Traditional masculinity is standing in the way of working-class men’s employment, and I think it’s a problem,” said Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist and public policy professor at Johns Hopkins and author of “Labor’s Love Lost: The Rise and Fall of the Working-Class Family in America.”
“We have a cultural lag where our views of masculinity have not caught up to the change in the job market,” he said.
But telling working-class men to take feminine jobs plays to their anxieties and comes off as condescending, said Joan Williams, a law professor at U.C. Hastings and author of “Reshaping the Work-Family Debate: Why Men and Class Matter.”
“White working-class men’s wages have plummeted, and what happens to men in that context is anxieties about whether they’re ‘real men,’ ” she said.
It’s no surprise, then, that Donald J. Trump appealed to men who feel this way — not just his promises to bring back factory jobs, but also his machismo.

 

[jhmd2000]

So you would like people to take available work, rather than go on public assistance. Go on.

 

[Coach O]

Boy the way Glen Miller played...

 

[RJKarl]

Songs that made the Hit Parade.

 

[knowell]

Who would have ever thought that Meathead would go on to make great movies.

 

[RJKarl]

It's in his genes. His dad is a legend. Rob Reiner spent his youth around comedic, TV and film geniuses. He had the keys to the kingdom and talent.

I think everyone would have known that if he was interested he'd be very, very successful.

 

[warak]

So you would like people to take available work, rather than go on public assistance. Go on.

I think that article also says that there are some jobs Americans, especially white male working class, just will not do. They would rather go on pubic assistance.

 

[PhDeac]

I think that article also says that there are some jobs Americans, especially white male working class, just will not do. They would rather go on pubic assistance.

Yes. Republicans are benefitting because many lesser educated white men are too picky to do jobs associated with women, minorities, or immigrants, or that require going to college.

It's strange that men have so much pride that they would rather maintain an identity as an unemployed blue collar worker who used to make $75K a year rather than take a job making $25K a year.