By The Bootstraps

Don Lemon recently ask Morgan Freeman if he thought that just anyone could pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Freeman answer was Hell Yes! Lemon disagreed and said that some people needed help ( such as the kind that the gov't gives ).

I am a big fan of Freeman. I think he might be a little wrong here. Maybe by as much as one percent. I was raised on a row crop farm where our cash income came from a " peckerwood sawmill". I had two brothers and three sisters. My mother and sisters canned from what we ( dad and the boys )raised on the farm. Our diet consisted of what we raised and a few staples from the local,store such as flour , coffee , salt , sugar etc., etc... we as a family supported ourself without help from anyone. My dad supplied food for two other families for a large portion of this time. Two from this family finished high school. The other four completed levels ranging ten or eleven years.all have had good lives and stayed financially independent.

For this to happen we worked our tails off ,sometimes night and day. We would operate the sawmill in the daytime, my older brother would haul (!using an old truck ) the sawn lumber to the lumber yard. I would leave the mill, walk home ( about three miles ) and work on the farm ( usually tractor work ) until sometimes midnight. Did we do this everyday? No , we just done on a daily basis whatever had to be done to complete the task at hand.

I have said the above to set the stage for bootstraps? One boy finished high school. He opted to find his fortune and did not seek higher education even though he did have the opportunity. He did complete a tech school that gave him additional opportunity. He progressed from hourly paid jobs to salaried supervisory jobs and then onto managerial opportunities. He finally realized a lifetime dream of starting and running his own company . The company was and is successful. He is an old man now that did things his way . He made many mistakes. He took many wrong paths. I am sure that if he was starting today that he would do many things differently but because of his upbringing he understood very well that one can pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

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