I remember the first job I had back when I was 17. I worked for a locally owned grocery store as a sacker. On my first day of work the temperature reached record tying triple digit values and it stayed blistering hot for much of the week. I soaked my button up shirt with sweat, pushing basket after basket of customers bagged goods out to their cars and unloading it for them.

I can still remember how tired I was, how much my shoulders and feet ached after that first day. After a couple of weeks things began to improve and the work got much easier as my body adjusted to it.

The payoff was in getting my first paycheck, because it was something that I earned and not given to me. $4.25 an hour may not seem like much today, but back then it went a lot further than the minimum wage these kids are making today, you could still get a 12oz can of pop from the machine for a quarter, a gallon of gas for about a buck and a pack of smokes for around $.70 to $1.50 back then.

Someone could even live on their own in a 1 bedroom apartment back then on this kind of money. Granted I did not have a car and I was scraping by at the end of the month, but I did it for a year without any government welfare assistance. I did that shit on my own.

Hard work isn't meaningless for those that take pride in or enjoy what they do... at least that is the way it used to be.

What is so demoralizing for many hardworking people today, is how lazy people can get rent, food and other things from the government and not even have to put on a work uniform to receive these things. To top it off, they get all the time in the world to go play or look for other free shit.

I often wish that the government would just go ahead and pull the plug on the welfare system and let folks get back to a meaningful life.