Reply #75: You were raised by a business owner, which makes you

[MSchreader]

Someone who, unsurprisingly, spits on those who made the wealth of this society. If he really did teach you the value of hard work, then I would expect you would understand that when those of us who spend our entire lives doing hard work want to take a little pride in what we do, and want to instill that in our kids, we bristle a little when someone like you then tries to accuse of "class warfare".

I started working when I was 12, putting together little bolts and nuts together for cars in a small shop in the city where I was born. When I graduated high school, I worked two jobs while attending community college. When the money ran out for college (because I was paying rent & utilities, plus paying for school), I dropped out and kept working. I moved to Detroit when I was 20 and started working full-time jobs, the last one being as a railroad worker on the midnight shift.

I was laid off in 2006 from that job, partly because they discovered my politics (they were getting ready to negotiate a new union contract, and I had already organized one opposition within the union that had been strong enough to register the first rejection of a tentative contract by that local in its 30-year existence) and partly because they needed me off of their health insurance (I had been diagnosed with cancer in 2001 and went through chemotherapy ... and kept working full-time, including a two-month stint in Charleston, SC, while undergoing treatment).

In June 2008 I was diagnosed with Stage IV congestive heart failure (a result of the choice of chemo treatment I was given, which was the only one the insurance company would pay for even though they knew the side effects ... but never told me) and ischemic cardiomyopathy (that's where your heart muscles slowly die off and are replaced by scar tissue), as well as diabetes type II with insulin resistance, hypertension (my personal record is 220/128 -- can you beat that?) and a host of other related illnesses that have since qualified me for Social Security disability (a whopping $924 a month!).

I consider that I sacrificed my body to the industrial lords, since the cancer that I got in 2001 (Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma in the lymph lining of my stomach) came from breathing in both hazardous chemicals leaking from tanks in the railroad yard and diesel fumes from the engines that ran day and night around me. And yet, I continued to work full time, putting all of my strength into it.

These days, I volunteer my time and energy (what little there is of it) to my party and to the Workers' International Industrial Union. I also help out my wife, who is a part-time teacher at a local community college and is herself disabled (multiple ruptured discs in her back, degenerative arthritis, multiple sclerosis, etc.), but who nonetheless helped to successfully organize the first union for part-time instructors at her school. She was denied Social Security disability, so she went back to work in spite of the problems.

Together we live on an income of $1,932 a month (sometimes a little more, when the state is willing to give her supplements unemployment), even though she has a Master's Degree in sociology.

So, yeah, you're welcome to call me Mr. Disdain and think me hostile. I've earned the right to be hostile and exercise a measure of disdain. Your "hard working" managers and professionals have given me a death sentence.

I will not live to see it, but someone, someday, will return the favor.