Victim mentality is epidemic in the US today. Everyone wants to look at their problems or situations and throw up their hands and claim its not their fault. But they DO have responsibility for themselves. None of us can fully control the situation that we find ourselves in but we do control how we choose to respond to it.
If you find yourself in a hole the first thing you need to do is to stop digging! – Traditional Wisdom
Most people have been told they have no power and that the fault lies outside themselves.
This is defeatist talk, and you need to get people who are naysayers and insist you have no ability or repeatedly tell you that nothing you want to try will work, these are people who are holding you down. These people, no matter how close they are to you are dragging you down and feeding your desire to give up but they are harbingers of the lie that you are just a victim.
You may not be able to control your situation but you have the only say as to how you will respond. You are in CONTROL OF YOUR OWN LIFE!
So, if you are in a bind, the first thing to do is to look at that bind and decide if there is anything that you do that adds to your trouble.
If you, like most of us, are having trouble with money and budgeting in this time of rising prices, then you can add $200.00 to your budget by not buying a fancy coffee at Scooters or Starbucks on the way to work. It may not seem like much, but it would be like getting a 2400$ raise each year – and that is just one simple change. You can add even more if you stop hitting up fast food or stop using/ordering through Door Dash or one of the other services. My son and I both did Door Dash when we were short of funds to get extra income on our off time. Most of the houses we delivered to did not look like upper middle-class homes but lower income houses who could not afford the cost of delivery and convenience. So many of these people today accept their victim hood and the lie that they can do nothing to change their life situation.
Han Solo was a great character but his first response to any crisis was to claim “It’s Not My Fault.” But, thankfully he then went on to find a way out of whatever jam he was in! I
I woke up too late to get my lunch ready for work one day and ordered a burrito meal from a popular delivery site after I got to work and ended up spending 3 times as much as I would have if I had time to stop and pick it up on the way to work. this was probably due to the remote location I was working at but it drove home how much more I was spending on this convenience. This was not only more than getting it yourself but considerably more than it would have cost me if I had made a sandwich or two the day before from lunchmeat and bread I already had in my kitchen. Many people spend hundreds of dollars a month ordering food online, by phone or eating out. This is money they could repurpose to get ahead or reshape the situation they are living in. As the proverb says:
If you find yourself in a hole the first thing you need to do is to stop digging! – Traditional Wisdom
By re-purposing money you save from unnecessary expenses into getting yourself out of trouble can be the first step. Repurpose your habits into something that helps you instead of keeping you down.
Some people look to the government to save them and think that if they just raised the minimum wage they would be OK. This is a lie. I have worked minimum wage jobs in my life. By working hard I got raises. Every time they raised the minimum wage everyone who has been working for the company is dragged back down to the starting wage. Many was a time that I was making $1.50 or more over minimum wage and had the minimum wage raised only to find that, although they gave me some credit for my work, I was now only 50 cents over the starting wage. Not only that but all of the products were more expensive. I worked for McDonalds (Which really can be a good place to work, despite the propaganda in the media. They even have a program where employees can buy stock in the company directly.) Raises were regular and fair based upon your work performance. But whenever the minimum wage was raised not only was my wage drug back down toward the starting wage but all the prices went up. To pay for the added money they had to pay the company would reduce our benefits. We used to get free food and could eat as much as we wanted on our shift during break. Then they raised the minimum wage and put a limit on the free food. Then next time the limit became even less, now I think that you just get a discount and no more free food. The money to pay that extra has to come from somewhere and that is provided by raising prices so the extra money really doesn’t benefit anyone at all. This is just one of the traps Wage-Slaves find themselves in. Expecting the government or anyone else to come and save you is setting yourself up for disappointment. You are in control of your own life and your own response to life. It is never hopeless! The only time you run out of options is if you take your own life. That is the only time there are no options left because you cancelled them in your despair.
Thomas Jefferson said that if you don’t have control of your own creativity/the output and work of your own hands then you are a slave to your employer. They used to call these “Wage-Slaves.” I think its time we make that phrase common again.
In the 1800s a lot of Southern Slaveholders would counter Yankees that their slaves had a more secure existence (home, food, lodging, clothes, etc.) than the wage-slaves of the North which were guaranteed nothing but a low wage. I remember reading an account of one man who ran away and went to New York to be free and found life so hard that he went back to Virginia and asked his master to take him back. Granted, that was not common (and slavery in the northernmost Southern States was very different than the hell holes of the lower Mississippi Valley.) But there have always been people who wanted safety and security more than they wanted freedom. That is where dictators come from and how they stay in power by making their people afraid and dependent. It is what many of the elite in the West are trying to do to us with their control of the media. Everything I see in national media I also look at local broadcasts of the same event. By doing so I often clearly see national medias “lies of omission” The facts they leave out tell me what they are trying to do by twisting the information we have.
More and more I have come to understand what Jefferson and others meant by “wage-slaves” I constantly hear people say “I can’t miss a day of work or I will get in trouble.” (Financially, or otherwise through fear of losing their job and that then cascading to losing their car or house because they cannot make payments.) “I can’t quit, much as I hate the job, because I need the money.” (Even though the job causes them so much stress they need to take medication and are getting counseling for stress.) These are things that “wage-slaves” say. They are bound to their nothing job just as assuredly as slaves were bound to their masters. Continuing to work and obey seems like the safe way to many. But they have ontinue in a life that has no options because they are relying on someone else to make their life better and so are barely making it by and they have NO chance of actually getting ahead. Except through their own action to overcome the lies that we are victims with no autonomy or ability to change. It is a lie that we must rely upon government or anyone else to save us or that we don’t have control.
So, the first thing to ask yourself is do you want safety in poverty and being beat down daily by your work situation or do you want to make a run for what the founders of America called: Dangerous Freedom? In Dangerous Freedom you take responsibility for your own life. Maybe by finding a “side gig” that maybe can become your main gig to provide you safety and security for the future. At first it will take work, you may have to work two jobs (your wage-slave job and your side gig,) and give up time with your friends but it is what young people have done in every era of history to try to build up the resources and to build the situation that would make them secure in the future. Almost no one has ever had a great life handed to them by someone else and history has proven that those how have are miserable and don’t appreciate it. further, they don’t have the power to rebuild if disaster strikes because they have never had to fight for anything. But life IS about fighting and we evolved to be in that struggle to survive. Without it something never blooms in our nature that was meant to be there.
If you are like me and you have been working for someone else your whole life, expecting that you would be secure in retirement, only to find that you were only secure in your poverty. Then you may have to put in this extra effort when you are old and not feeling so hot. But it is always your responsibility to choose how YOU will act to face the situation that YOU are in. It is not someone else’s responsibility to take care of you or me it is our own. It is my fault that I didn’t prepare for the worst. In fact, I didn’t even imagine how worse the worst could get. My retirement plan didn’t include being housebound for three years and unable to work, nor did it include a transplant surgery and its recovery time. And I was putting away 14% of my income into savings and or retirement every paycheck!
But, in the end, I was relying on security from outside and thought that if I served my country it would serve me in my retirement. Now I have security to “just get by” unless I act on my own. My Dad had a good boss who he could give loyalty to and loyalty was returned so he retired in comfort and so my mom had money to live in a retirement home after he died. Unfortunately, too many deny the responsibility they have to others in their relationships and todays corporations and huge companies just look at people as a number. But we are not numbers. We have a will. And we can use it to change our direction.
As for me perhaps if I had not had to live off those resources for so many years when I couldn’t work I would be in a completely different situation. I will never know. But at least I had those resources to fall back upon. We cannot control our situation only our response to it. I thought I would have years where my wife and I could turn our six-figure income into future security but all of that was cut short unexpectedly by being home-bound for years after an accident and the following disability. The insurance company blamed my previous service-connected injury and said it wasn’t their fault and the government blamed the accident, and I ended up getting nothing. Now, it is up to us to find a way out of our situation.
I thought I had a secure retirement with the government and the free VA Health Care but, it was cut short before I could finish my plan. Now I need to keep working when I thought I would be retired. I do have free health care but, as I told my friends, you get what you pay for and VA government run health care may be free but if I hadn’t had another insurance policy through my Federal Retirement I would have died rather than getting a transplant. The VA had not even managed to get me on a donor list by that time my own organ shut down. I was confident in my own strength right up till when it failed.
Hats off to all organ donors. My life today is because of you.
3 times in my life my pantry stock had built up to 6 months’ worth of food and each time I had unemployment or another situation where I had to use it up. I didn’t go out and buy expensive survival food to build that, but every time we went to the store, we bought an extra 12 cans of something or other that was on sale. Even if we didn’t eat it immediately, I knew we would eventually because it was the type of food we ate regularly. Then, when our situation changed, and we needed to augment our budget by digging into our food storage it was there. And so many I talk to see no reason to save for emergencies.
I advocated to each of my kids to always have at least $3000 in the bank for emergencies but now everything is twice as expensive. And emergencies could easily cost you twice that today. Without savings of at least 3 months of income you are in danger. The easiest way to start saving that is to put a little away each time. People often think saviing up a pantry and money for emergencies are too much or unnecessary, but they have served me many times in my life from the unexpected. I never accepted the lie that I had no agency and had to just accept things passively.
Now we are in a time when our societal structures themselves seem to be in a fragile condition and if they fall we need to be ready. Anyone who sits there and relies on the government to keep them alive or to save them when the SHTF are probably going to die. Anyone who accepts the lie of the victim mentality is also going to die because victims have no agency. Never accept that you are a victim under control of someone or something other than your own will!
Last week 22 people were shot in Kansas City and despite hundreds of cops being on the scene they were still shot by what the mayor called “thugs.” they had some type of argument and thought their difference of opinion was enough to start shooting at each other with illegally obtained handguns. The “thugs” that I saw were in their teens and they did not legally own guns but bought them on the black market or stole them. People who want more laws to stop that need to understand that it is illegal to shoot people, but it is still done. It is illegal to jay-walk, but it is still done.
See below how the people in the news clips continue to spread the lie that we are in situations and only the government can save us. One person, in the video below, lied and said Missouri didn’t have background checks. That’s a lie. I live less than five minutes from a bridge where I can cross into Missouri and they, like all the states of the Union have Federal Background checks that are required. I also include another video, somewhat off topic, of a journalist who believed media lies and propaganda tried to prove how easy it was to buy a gun and didn’t do it, the laws in place were too hard for him to overcome and he failed the background check. Contrary to the lies about the ease of obtaining firearms she couldn’t. But that is all part of the fear and victim narrative they use to keep you down. The videos show that there are other things going on and cities that expect the “government to save them” will be disappointed. Look at all the zeros in the nonurban counties of Missouri) in the statistics of the video below. One county of Saint Louis – which has chosen to elect neither Republican nor Democrat elite to guide their city has the lowest rates of shooting even though it is larger than one of the other urban counties.) In the counties in the country there were NO deaths by shooting despite every country home I know having more than one gun.
There used to be a song with a chorus “A country boy can survive.” That is because they need to be self-reliant because there is no help nearby. That was the staple of America and its glory the self-reliance of our ciitizens before the “victim-narrative” began lying to us and sapping our will.
The cops in KC apprehended 3 of the thugs but couldn’t save the people, even though they were right there. Granted, it probably would have been worse if they hadn’t but it was a citizen who tackled one of the shooters that stopped the shooting. I am not saying the Police don’t matter. But they are a response force that too often is there after a tragedy. It is good that they are there but as we used to say when I was in Federal Law enforcement the police aren’t there to save you they are there to arrive after the event and draw white chalk lines around your bodies and then figure out what happened and, hopefully, capture the culprit who did it. However, since most gun fights take place in 3 rounds and are over in less than a minute there is no chance police can be called and arrive in time to actually stop anything. When I lived in the country, I remember calling the County Sheriff and I was told that it would be an hour and a half before law enforcement could respond. The county had two cars and they were both answering calls on the far side of the county. It would take them about 30-45 minutes to resolve their calls and then another 45 minutes to drive to my location, but they would dispatch the first one that was free. In a city response time can be anywhere from 10 minutes to a half hour for police to arrive on scene once they are called. People who have lived in a city all their life have no clue what the situation is of the Red counties throughout the US. Country folk learn to take care of themselves and their neighbors and to rely on themselves and their neighbors because there is no other option. Unfortunately, city residents tend to learn to rely on government. And government fails them just as it is failing the counties in Missouri with high homicide rates.
Self reliance and taking responsibility for where you choose to be in your situation is up to you. Like the proverb says:
If you find yourself in a hole the first thing you need to do is to stop digging! – Traditional Wisdom
It can be as simple to start as finding one thing that you do each day or every week and cutting that out. I used to drink a lot of pop and not enough water. So I started drinking a glass of water between each pop. I already had the habit of having a drink on hand all the time so I just used that habit to increase my water consumption. I not only felt better but I lost twenty pounds in a month. Look around. Is there anything you are doing that you need to stop doing to keep from making your hole deeper? Do you have any habits that you can adapt to help you change your life situation? Is there anything you can do ahead of time to stock up for emergency situations? Is there a side hustle you can use to build up a reserve in case you are unable to work for six months or more?
Take control of your own life by taking stock of your situation and figuring out what you can do to start to change it. A Chinese proverb says that the longest journey begins with one step. But if you never take that step you will never go anywhere but where you are.
You are responsible for the actions you take in any given situation. You have control of what you do and how you live your own life. Don’t give it over to someone else because you are the one who cares most about your success and survival and you are the one who best knows what you need and can do. You know what changes you need to make to become the person you were meant to be. Take some quiet time and think about it. Ask yourself the question before you go to sleep and sometimes the answer comes to you once the noise of the world is silenced.
