Your News Today is an Opinion Piece 200525

      Less Educated
      I was thinking about this today. Real progress in this country began after WW-2 when soldiers and sailors came home from the war. The vast majority of them were what we call uneducated today, yet they were the foundation that built this country to what it is today. In our families alone, Joyce's father, my father, our uncles were self educated and yet did quite well. Not a one of them finished high school, yet they all worked hard and supported their families. Joyce's father took night classes on aircraft build and design. He ended up working on one of the first space capsules. Her uncle Marks ran the parts department at the Saint Louis Chevrolet assembly plant and knew every part number put into a Chevy and had it all in his head. Her uncle William was the service manager at a Pontiac dealership in Saint Louis. Her uncle Joe had his own bowling alley and installed and maintained one of the first Brunswick automatic pin setters. My Uncle Tom had his own tool and die business in Saint Louis. My uncle Kenny started and ran his own roofing business. My father just loved driving; he chose to drive an ambulance after the war and later drove trucks.
      Today's Well Educated
      Now the majority of people here today have at least undergraduate level educations, meaning a degree in something or other. Many are doing jobs that require a year or two of high school at best. Our technological progress has come from well educated engineers, but many of the country's workers are not doing things their education would suggest. They build up large debt going to college and then cannot service the debt and end up living with their parents again. My impression is that they feel self important, too much so to actually do the work they are hired to do and things don't get handled and done correctly for the rest of us.
      Wealth Disparity
      There is tremendous wealth in this country, but it is only in the hands of a very few. If a person earns that wealth, I have no problem with that. My displeasure comes with the fact that the hard workers that make things happen in every facet of of creating that wealth do not get their share of that wealth. During the fifties, sixties and seventies workers got a share of the prosperity and that was good for everyone. There's an old saying. "a rising tide lifts all boats." These days there's a hole in the worker's boats and the anchors keep their boats down in the mud at the bottom of the river.