Take Care Of Your Business, VIII

Respect Yourself And The Country Around You

A few weeks ago, I drove from Colorado to North Carolina and back. I wanted to see my son and daughter and grandkids, and haul out several holidays' worth of unshipped presents to them. And I wanted to have a little adventure, the type of which you can only have when you see the U-S-A in your Chev-ro-let (or, in my case, your little import pickup truck).

I wasn't in a hurry. I took some back roads. On the way out east, I stopped by the Shiloh National Battlefield and filled myself with a new consciousness of the courage and perseverance it took to preserve freedom in our Union a century-and-a-half ago. And on the way back, I meandered through the coal mining countryside of West Virginia and Kentucky, where I gained a new respect for, well, respect.

The poorest economic areas of our nation are now in the inner portions of our big cities. Social programs have drawn an ever-increasing percentage of our population to the cities where poor people can be "helped" (or supervised, or - some might say - enslaved), so the poorest part of the country is no longer the rural coal-mining region. But you can still see the ghost of poverty everwhere you look in coal country, from the hollowed-out mining towns to the once-bustling shop districts now devoid of humanity.

But the worst thing I saw was the garbage.

In rural North Carolina, near the area now called the "research triangle" and where the elite class now lives, the countryside may not be pristine, but it's pretty. Same for Virginia. But by the time I got to coal country, I saw a volume of roadside garbage that surprised me, and the likes of which I don't see anywhere else (and I've driven extensively throughout the American countryside). Occasionally, the road widened and I'd see a cluster of huge, ostentatiously-pretty homes with attractive landscaping. Then I'd drive around the next bend in the road, and there again, I'd see piles of trash.

Why doesn't anyone get out and clean this up? I wondered. Out west, on the way out, I'd seen jail crews out in their orange vests, filling bags with roadside trash. Why don't the coal country communities even care enough about how their towns and landscapes look to dispatch jail crews to clean them up? I mean, I hadn't seen trash like this since the last time I walked around the poor inner-city areas of Denver, or Phoenix, or Los Angeles, or San Francisco, or Atlanta, or Dallas, or Chicago, or New York.

You know, the places young protestors like to "Occupy" these days.

I have a theory: there's a legacy of victimhood in these places that doesn't soon depart, once people become accustomed to being taken care of by the government and not to taking care of themselves. And wherever people feel poor and incapable of self-determination, the cycle becomes deeply rooted and the trash starts to pile up. The answer, I figured, was this: they don't have the habit of self-respect in some places in America, and you can tell those places by the garbage.

Forget for the moment the inner workings of collectivist economics. Forget the inner city. Focus instead on your inner self. Are you feeding your inner Victim with negativity, envy, jealousy, class-warfare, and self-loathing of everything from your own nation to your own talents? Or are you feeding the opposite part of your nature - your inner Entrepreneur - with optimism, self-reliance, generosity, and self-respect of everything from your resume to your community?

If you think of yourself as just another cog in the great machine, as just another unit of human resource to be deployed (or not) by your government masters, as just another number to be called at the unemployment office... please, for the sake of us all, think again. Think of yourself as a business. You're in business to share the best of your skills and talents with an eager market. You're in business to find and keep happy customers. Whether or not you actually own and run a commercial enterprise, you're in business to be the best you can be. Don't concern yourself with getting your "fair share" - focus on making the world better, and trust that everyone will get a better share when there's simply more to go around.

Make, don't take. Expect to take care of yourself and others, not to be taken care of. Thinking of ways to create new opportunities beats sitting around and lamenting the opportunities politicians say you never got. It beats it every time.

While I was in coal country, I took the opportunity to go by Coalwood, where the story of "October Sky" is set. It's an inspiring movie, and therefore one of my favorites. It's a story about overcoming adversity, not succumbing to it. And you can still see the self-respect in that tiny little place, where rockets took off and true hope soared, more than half a century ago. Folks there are probably still poor... but the town's a little cleaner, and there is almost a palpable optimism in the air that still hasn't left Coalwood since the days of Homer Hickam and "the Rocket Boys."

Then, just around the corner, on the way back to the main road, there are piles of garbage by the side of the otherwise-beautiful country road. I tried not to look at the trash. I tried to look at the opportunity there - the opportunity to clean up the landscape and reclaim the beauty of this one little corner of America.

The government wants to grow by making you diminish. Your opponents in life want to keep you hopeless, helpless, and self-loathing. But you don't have to be those things. You can ignore the victim-makers. You can take care of your own business with true self-respect, and watch your fortunes take off - like a rocket.