Reading my good buddy Surduspub's blog about his advisees who just graduated from college raised a troubling question in my mind....namely, where is the work ethic in today's youth?

William Safire, speechwriter during the LBJ years, first coined this wonderful alliteration that is often wrongly attributed to LBJ himself: "the nattering nabobs of negativism have formed their own 4-H club, the Hysterical Hypochondriac Hypocrites of History".  Nothing is more true today than that phrase.  The liberal masses have crammed down our throats this image of an America that must, at the expense of all others, prop up those who do not wish to work.  Now before you begin to burn me in effigy, hear me out as I lay out my defense of this statement.

SSI and SSDI were created to assist those truly in need of assistance in living.  Those downtrodden who, for few reasons they could control, were unable to find jobs to support their families, put food on their tables, and the like.  Today, it has grown into a massive black hole of "doleness", enabling hundreds of thousands of people to work part time at a job while earning money from the government for their disability, real or perceived.  

I personally know of many people fully capable of working fulltime, who would rather work 20 hours a week (or 25, whatever it is now) and then sit back and draw their SSI/SSDI.  It's a great scheme, isn't it? Work part-time for full time wages. If I didn't have a work ethic, I'd be signed up too, in a heartbeat.  But all it has done is simply make us enablers of those with no desire to work.  I'm not begrudging those who truly need help, more power to them.  But those who simply coast through school, becoming professional students so that they can continue to stay on the draw, or those who, such as some deaf people, are fully capable of working full time jobs and trying to work their way up the ladder to self-sufficiency, are an enormous drain on the system and horrible role models to boot.

Take me for example (my wife would say PLEASE take him):  I drew SSDI for two years while attending college.  Oooooh!  I'm a hypocrite!  Hold on a minute....I was attending Gallaudet University first at the time (name a more expensive place to live than Washington DC for a college student), applied for several jobs on campus, and was turned down.  Why? Here is what blows my mind, MY SIGNING WAS NOT "UP TO PAR", for at least one job, and the other had such a large number of applicants that I was lost in the pool (lab assistant, if I recall correctly, for the biology department).  So I got SSDI to reduce the burden on my middle class parents and allow me to have some money for expenses (HEY, beer is a legitimate expense in college, okay?)

Shortly after completing one full year at Gallaudet, I moved back to Kentucky and re-enrolled at Eastern Kentucky University and obtained a part-time job at a local grocery store.   Slowly but surely, after a few months, my hard work was rewarded and they offered me full time.  I snapped it up in a heartbeat, even though I was attending college full time as well, and I also immediately notified SSI and requested they stop payments to me.  I had a few sleepless nights between work and school work, but it was worth it.  In the space of 3 years, I graduated with not one, but two degrees, thanks to all those notetakers and interpreters who made classes easier to handle, as well as my hard work.  

Then came the hiring game in my field.  A deaf man in the Loss Prevention field? Never been done to anyone's knowledge before me.  Door after door was slammed in my face. I left the grocery business and went into the security field, closely related to my degrees.  I started out as an investigator for a company that had never done investigations before.  I helped build the program from the ground up in that company, starting out taking "lover's triangle" cases where one spouse suspected the other of cheating, then moving into background checks on applicants for our clients, undercover work in factories where the client suspected employees of stealing, doing drugs, etc., and then on into worker's compensation investigations.  The whole time I did this, I also worked on the weekends as a security guard at a client's McDonald's location.  My pay during those times?  $5.50/hour for guard work, and $6.50/hour for investigations.  

But I persevered, continuing to go out on interview after interview, only to have a door slammed in my face repeatedly.  One such company whom I won't name, but whose name rhymes with Hidelty Hinvestments, actually flat out refused to hire me for a distribution center guard job that did not require answering the phone, because I would not be able to work 3rd shift, in their opinion, which might require answering the phone once in a while (several different guards per shift, why cant' one of THEM answer the damn phone?).  When I pointed out that a reasonable accomodation would be to have me work 1st and 2nd shifts only, they stated it "would not be fair to other guards or applicants, we can't change the whole department just to make you happy".

But I soldiered on....Long story short, I ended up going into the retail Loss Prevention field, rising up as far as becoming a District Loss Prevention Manager for a Fortune 50 company, having 9 stores report directly to me, with 1300 employees in those stores, and sales in excess of $400 million dollars a year, and to top it all off, not only meeting my budget for losses, but actually obliterating it and doing better than my hearing peers while in a much tougher market than them.  Pretty daggone good, huh?  Now my question is this...

Why can't other disabled people show that kind of initiative?  I'll answer the question for you....Because they have NO INCENTIVE to, we have become such a government of enablers, that actually NOT working hard is rewarded.  They have become hypochondriacs to the medicine of free and easy money, they become hysterical if anyone suggests screwing with that money, and they have become the biggest hypocrites in history by suggesting that they are disabled and drawing off the dole, but bristling when someone calls them that, suggesting instead, the term "differently abled".  Talk about having your cake and eating it too...