I'm So Happy When I'm Eating....

     There is such a gap between how poor and rich children interact with food that carries over to rest of their lives, it complicates our understanding of why here in the United States, contrary to international trends, poor people are far more prone to obesity than their wealthier counterparts. Many have posited that it's not how much poorer households are eating, but what they are eating that has caused this trend. And there is plenty of reason to believe there is truth to this—studies have shown, after all, that lower income families choose substantially less healthy foods than others. The harms of unhealthier diets, however, are all the more nefarious when they're coupled with a fractured ability to regulate eating.

     But the fact that the patterns exists steepens what we already know to be an uphill climb for those born into poverty in the United States. The tentacles of poverty touch many different aspects of people's lives. Food is a particularly apt example—food inequality, whereby America's wealthiest people eat well, while the country's poorest eat, poorly, is not only real, but worsening—but it's hardly the only one. Poverty has, for instance, been shown to shackle those who are born into it, severely limiting their ability to succeed in society—socially, academically, and financially.

       Increasingly, it seems the key to breaking the cycle of poverty might lie in understanding that the gap begins to grow at a very early age, cementing itself in ways that make it very difficult to untangle. And there are few things as stark as the difference between how poor and rich kids develop relationships with food.

When the poor are forced to the suburbs, getting to work becomes a huge challenge

En route to apply to jobs in downtown Atlanta, Lauren Scott checks a message on her phone regarding a job that she'd applied for.

FOREST PARK, Ga. — She set off on the latest day of job-hunting wearing tiny star-shaped earrings that belonged to her 18-month-old daughter and frayed $6 shoes from Walmart that were the more comfortable of her two pairs. In her backpack she had stashed a ham-and-cheese sandwich for lunch, hand sanitizer for the bus and pocket change for printing résumés at the public library. She carried a spiral notebook with a handwritten list of job openings that she’d titled her “Plan of Action for the Week.”
It had been 20 months since Lauren Scott lost her apartment and six months since she lost her car and 10 weeks since she washed up at a homeless shelter in this suburb south of Atlanta with no money and no job. Her daughter, Za’Niyah, had already lived in seven places, and Scott feared that her child would soon grow old enough to permanently remember the chaos. So shortly after sunrise, she packed Za’Niyah into a day-care bus that picked up the shelter’s children, walked to the closest bus station and used her phone to find directions to the first of the companies on her list, an industrial site that would have been 27 minutes away by car.
She squinted, with a light sigh, at the public-transit curlicue she was about to make through Atlanta:
Sixty-nine stops on a bus;
a nine-minute train ride;

Scott fills out a job application at a kiddie playland facility as her daughter Za’Niya, 18 months, finds a cracker she dropped earlier.

an additional 49 stops on a bus;
a quarter-mile walk.
“Off to the races,” Scott, 28, said as she boarded the No. 55 bus, and this was a day much like the others, when the cost of destitution was a job hunt in which even the simplest task — placing an application — required four hours, round-trip, on a bus.
Scott just needed to get to her job interview, but she was finding around her the obstacles that have shaped this region’s increasingly pervasive and isolating form of extreme poverty. In the metropolitan areas of the Deep South, government policies and rising real estate prices have pushed the poor out of urban centers and farther from jobs. Low-income people have, in turn, grown more reliant on public-transit networks that are among the weakest in the country. When they search for work, they step into a region where pay tends to be low and unemployment tends to be high. The share of residents in deep poverty — with incomes below $10,045 for a parent and two children — in these Deep South metro areas has grown by 24 percent over the past decade, according to Census Bureau data.
But even as their ranks have grown, the deeply impoverished in the Deep South have also increasingly found that they are on their own: They are less likely to receive the help of a spouse — or the government. Five of the six states with the highest proportion of single parents are in the Deep South. Meanwhile, policymakers have dismantled the cash assistance programs that used to provide critical support for the jobless with children. Those like Scott not only have less access to jobs, they also have less of a safety net when they are unemployed.
Scott was starting her latest week with a notebook full of bullet-by-bullet leads and a series of bus rides to follow up on them. Apply to Randstad Staffing, she had written in neat cursive; it was hiring for warehouse positions. Apply to Walmart, she had written just below. Millwood Inc., she had written along with the company’s address — her first stop of the week. Days earlier, she spotted Millwood’s ad on a Facebook page for unemployed Georgians. The company wanted in-person applicants.
Aboard the bus, Scott zigzagged through Clayton County, an area that runs south from Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport and has transformed over 25 years from majority white to majority black, its poverty rate rising during that span from 9 percent to 24 percent. A generation of poor people resettled here after Atlanta shuttered inner-city housing projects, and now title-loan and pawn shops were the lone life in sleepy strip malls; traffic backed up for an hour to wait in line at a weekly food pantry; and at a plasma center where people could get up to $50 for blood donations, lines formed many mornings around the building before the 7:30 a.m. opening.

Marcia Champion, left, and Olivia Durden, who are homeless, wait with their children just after 6 a.m. for the No. 55 bus that will take them to downtown Atlanta.

What Scott saw in Clayton County was a place ill equipped for the influx of poverty. Just 10 miles south of the new condominiums in Atlanta, the county had no public housing and a few modest bus lines — a service that had started only this year, after a referendum passed. The main streets lacked sidewalks, and Scott often found herself tiptoeing alongside traffic.
“This place isn’t meant for poor people,” Scott said.
On the bus, Scott — sitting in one of the front rows — clutched her backpack and looked out the window. As the single-story homes and unkempt yards of Forest Park gave way to the Atlanta skyline, she checked to make sure her hair was in a neat bun.
Then it was time to move. A train took Scott to a transfer point at a concrete bus terminal. From there, the No. 73 bus brought her away from the city in a different direction, toward a four-lane road of hangarlike industrial buildings and 18-wheelers. At one of the last stops on the route, Scott and four others got out. They all looked like job seekers, Scott thought — these men and women in their 20s and 30s wearing pullovers and worn dress shoes, pulling out their phones, trying to get their bearings. Scott gave them one last glance and tried to race ahead.

Children change everything
Before becoming a mother, Scott had no problem finding work. She’d prepared food for the elderly and stocked shelves and sold magazines over the phone. She’d collected debts and made fast-food burgers and, most recently, answered calls from Verizon customers. She had a small apartment, rented for $495 per month, where black mold spread across the walls. But she was self-sufficient. She could afford food. “I was maybe one notch above poverty,” Scott said.
Having a child pushed her well below the poverty line. There was another person to support and there was less money to stash away, and suddenly there was no way to pay for a broken-down car, then there was no easy way to get to work. And then, as of May, there was no work at all: The call center wanted Scott to take night shifts, and Za’Niyah was eligible only for subsidized daytime child care. Scott quit and tried to find something else, somewhere else.
With Za’Niyah in tow, traveling by bus, Scott briefly stayed in New Jersey with people who knew her sister. And then she spent a cramped week with a sickly relative in Tennessee. And then she lost her last $3,500 in savings during a summer in Texas with a roommate who jacked up the rent and asked for help paying bills after getting bilked in a title-loan deal. Then Scott returned to Atlanta, because, she said, “if I was going to be stranded in a city, it might as well be one I know.” She wound up at the Calvary Refuge homeless shelter in Clayton County, given a brick-walled room that she decorated with pictures of her daughter and nobody else.
The others in Scott’s life were largely out of touch. One of Scott’s siblings had just gotten out of prison; another was in the military. Scott’s old boyfriend — Za’Niyah’s father — was who knows where, out of contact for a year and probably for good. Scott, who long ago lost contact with her mother, spent many years in the foster-care system and several more with her grandmother, sharing the home with 15 others.
Scott was penniless.
“So few options,” she said.
A generation earlier, even people in Scott’s situation had advantages that she lacks. They tended to live in the middle of Atlanta, near the subway, and they received welfare, cash payments from the government that were available to nearly all in deep poverty, regardless of whether they had a job.
But over the past 20 years, the virtual elimination of that component of the safety net in Southern states has created a new kind of poverty, one in which people are left more to their own devices, with less access to cash in times of desperation. That shift amounts to a major change in the strategy for addressing the needs of the poor — a change that stems from the belief that entitlement programs failed to incentivize work and trapped people in poverty.
The dramatic overhaul took root in 1996 with reforms under President Bill Clinton, who had pledged to “transform a broken system” and end a “cycle of dependence.” In doing so, he granted governors wide latitude — as they had requested — to draw up their own welfare programs. States would receive federal block grants, but they were under no obligation to give cash handouts. Instead, they could use the money in other ways — to educate job hunters, encourage marriage or fund child-focused government agencies. The federal government also expanded tax credits for low-income workers, creating another incentive for the poor to find jobs.
The legacy of the changes, on a national level, is mixed: The safety net has expanded for those who can hold down jobs, but it has shrunk for those who cannot. The earned-income tax credit — a benefit for low-income workers — plays a far greater role than welfare in fighting poverty. But the system also creates vulnerabilities during times of economic distress, when the unemployment rate rises.

Prosperity Issues
The Deep South most clearly shows the legislation’s downsides, policy experts say. In a region that already had the greatest proportion of people living in deep poverty, governors have gone the furthest in reducing the availability of welfare, making it all but disappear as an option for the poor by narrowing income requirements and erecting high job-hunting expectations. At the same time, jobs are relatively hard to find: 43 of 46 metro areas in the Deep South have unemployment rates worse than the national average, according to government data.
“If you look at those who are simply unable to work or who are cycling through terrible-paying jobs in the South, when they cycle out, what you find is that nothing is left for them,” said Joe Soss, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota who studies poverty and social policy.
Across the five states in the region — Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina — 58 percent of impoverished families with children received welfare in the pre-Clinton years, according to data compiled by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Now, that percentage has tumbled below 10 percent. In Georgia, the state with the sharpest decline, only 7 percent of poor families with children receive welfare, compared with 98 percent in 1994.
State officials say some of the money that could have been used for cash handouts has instead been invested in programs to educate job hunters. But critics say states have used the bulk of the money to plug general budget holes. This has been especially problematic for single mothers. Over the past 15 years, the poverty rate for single mothers in the Deep South has risen from 42 percent to 46 percent, according to Census Bureau data, a rate that is five to 10 percentage points higher than in other regions of the country. The region has female labor-force participation rates that lag behind the national average, and the percentage of single moms with jobs hasn’t budged in 20 years.
Food stamps, another key part of the safety net for the poor, remain widely used in all states but cover only a specific portion of expenses — amounting to several hundred dollars per month.
Other factors add to the difficulty of the poor in finding work. Those who can’t afford to live in city centers often must depend on walking, hitching rides or undertaking laborious commutes on public transportation. A 2011 Brookings Institution report ranking transit in the nation’s 100 largest metro areas found that 15 of the weakest 20 systems — judged by coverage and job access — were in the South. They included systems in Birmingham, Ala.; Greenville, S.C.; Baton Rouge; and Atlanta — where, in earlier decades, majority-white suburbs voted against the expansion of a transit system they viewed as being primarily for black residents.
The lack of physical mobility feeds into the deeper but related problem of economic immobility: Areas throughout the South — and Atlanta in particular — provide among the lowest chances that someone born into poverty will move up the income ladder.
Over the past 20 years, Atlanta’s wealthiest areas, spread along the north of the city, have changed little. But formerly middle-class suburbs to the south — areas of modest single-family homes — have been deluged by newcomers who lost homes as city officials dismantled dozens of housing projects in the hopes of reducing concentrated poverty. Experts who have studied Atlanta’s economic geography say the change has been partly successful; class no longer changes so clearly between neighborhoods, but meanwhile, the poor — given modest vouchers to help subsidize their housing costs — must head far from the city to find places they can afford.
“This city hasn’t built out its society,” said Deborah Scott, the executive director of an area nonprofit organization, Georgia Stand-Up, that focuses on low-income communities. “We’ve given the suburbs to the poorer people, but the opportunities aren’t here.”
For Scott and her daughter, Za’Niyah, time was running short to find an opportunity, because the homeless shelter allowed people to stay no longer than four months. So while searching for a job, Scott tried to fall back on the only other support she could think of and headed to Clayton County’s government family services center, a place on Battle Creek Road — 17 minutes away by car, 52 minutes by bus — that offered orientation meetings for welfare applicants.
About 30 people had shown up, nearly all of them women, and the official leading the meeting said that Georgia gave out welfare only in specific cases.
If you had a job, you needed to leave.
Same if anybody at home received Social Security.
Or if you got child support.
Or if you were in a two-parent home.
By the end, Scott later recalled, only six women were left.
Those who remained were asked to search for jobs at a rapid clip — at least 20 per week, with proof of contact for every one — and after Scott did this for two weeks, all part of the pre-application, she checked on the status of her welfare application with her smartphone and saw that she’d been denied. “Closure reason — you refused to cooperate with the application process,” the state website said. (A state spokeswoman said she could not discuss the case.)
“They want you to get a job, which is not all bad,” Scott said. “But the way they go about it is horrible.”
Scott called several times to inquire about what happened but reached only machines. Among more than 64,000 people living in poverty in Clayton County, 137 adults receive welfare, according to Georgia government data. Scott gave up on trying to become the 138th.

Keeping a promise
By the time Scott headed toward Millwood Inc., the first stop listed in her notebook, she’d become used to submitting applications and hearing nothing. She’d put in for jobs at Burger King and Smoothie King, Foot Action and Foot Locker, an Amazon.com warehouse and a Jewish nursing home — more than 50 places in total. She’d briefly found work at a Kroger supermarket, but it lasted only for several weeks; the company learned that she had a charge of simple battery on her record, the result of a fight in 2008. (Scott says she is working with a local justice center to get the charge expunged.)
After getting fired, she resumed job hunting the next day.
“I promised Za’Niyah, as long as I’m living and breathing, she’ll be all right,” Scott said. “There is no way I turn into a piece of spaghetti and be weak or crumble or fall. That is not an option.”
Scott, initially, hadn’t wanted to be a mother — and in fact she’d been told she couldn’t be one. A doctor 10 years ago said that complications from a bladder surgery when she was a teen had rendered her infertile. Scott assumed it was true. And when, four years ago, she felt a spark for an old high school friend, she believed that they’d never be more than companions. Scott was working at a Walgreens at the time, giving out so many diabetes medications that she eventually noticed the symptoms in herself: fatigue, sleepiness, hunger. She went to the hospital. She didn’t have diabetes. A doctor told her she was pregnant.
“No way!” Scott remembers thinking. “I stormed outside.”
She went to another hospital for a second opinion. She was told the same thing.
“I was terrified,” she said. “I couldn’t do it as a parent. I never had parents. The initial fear — how am I supposed to do it?”
“There was this shopper at Walgreens, this 86-year-old,” Scott continued. “And she told me: ‘God is going to give you this intuition. You’ll know when to change her and feed her and love her.’ That was July 3, 2014. I talked to Za’Niyah and I said, ‘Okay, you can come out now.’ I stepped out of bed the next day and my water broke.”
And into the world came “this little thing,” Scott said, the first time in her life there’d been a second person to care about. And now Za’Niyah was a lot of joy and a lot of work. She needed baby wipes and diapers and a winter coat and children’s books — the kind Scott liked to read as ­Za’Niyah fell asleep.
“I’ll take any job, even fast food,” Scott said. “But what I want is something where I can take care of myself and my child once I leave [the shelter]. Something that I can be partially proud of.”
The opportunity at Millwood was one of the best that she had tried for. It paid $15 an hour — more than she had ever made — and provided on-the-job training, according to the help-wanted flier. Scott hopped off the bus after a 124-minute commute and gazed at the wide road, where the buildings tended to be long and unmarked. She straddled the gravel fringe of the road and felt the force of the 18-wheelers as they whizzed by, heading east on Fulton Industrial Boulevard. She arrived 10 minutes later at a gas station and realized that she was walking in the wrong direction. She turned around and tap-danced along the gravel on the other side of the road.
Two hours and 26 minutes after she left Calvary Refuge, Scott was at Millwood, a company that repairs warehouse pallets. It was a hulking facility where trucks parked in even lines in front of dock doors and where, at the end of the property, employee cars were clustered in front of a small office. Scott neared, dabbing a little sweat from her face, and saw applicants all around the parking lot, some bent over the hoods of vehicles filling out applications.
“Look at that,” Scott whispered. “That scares me.”
She walked into the office, and 15 more people stood shoulder to shoulder in the entrance foyer. The main office door was locked with a key code, and the one window was shuttered. A plastic bin for blank applications was already empty, and those in the foyer idled for five minutes until a human resources staffer opened the door a crack and handed out 15 more.
“Take only one,” the employee said. “We’re already overrun. Take one, fill it out, and put it in the bin.”
Scott crouched in a corner of the foyer and spent three minutes filling in the blanks. Somebody else crouched next to her and asked to borrow a pen. Others held their applications against the wall while filling them out.
“Horrible,” Scott said on the way out. “I was thinking, ‘Forget this, I should just leave.’ But no, I’ll gamble like everyone else.”
It was nearly noon, and Scott was already thinking about how much more she could fit into her day before Za’Niyah returned from day care. There was still more to do. She needed to take a bus to the public library. She needed to search for jobs online. She needed to print more résumés. But then, she got a call from a place to which she’d applied weeks earlier — a home for the elderly that wanted a dietary aide. Could Scott come in for an interview tomorrow? Of course, Scott said.
So back on the bus, Scott pulled out her phone and punched in a new address, just to see what the commute would be like. The facility was in a wealthier section of Atlanta, in a neighborhood called Virginia-Highland, and Scott tried not to get too ahead of herself, but this time she was thinking about a journey she’d make not just once but perhaps every day.
Google Maps said the commute was an hour and 28 minutes.
Scott made a sour face for a half-second, then shrugged.
“I’ve traveled farther,” she said.

Slavery was not an event

    "Slavery was not an event. It was a 400 year process, cultivated through an elaborate system of exploitation. More precisely, Christians (i.e., Europeans) and Arabs (i.e., Muslims) exploited African labor, skill and creative genius in order to create White wealth." ~ 

By:  Obafemi Origunwa, MA

Though sadistic and macabre, the plain truth is that slavery was an unprecedented economic juggernaut whose impact is still lived by each of us daily.

Here are 10 things everyone should know about the economic roots of slavery:

1) Slavery laid the foundation for the modern international economic system.
The massive infrastructure required to move 8 to 10 million Africans halfway around the world built entire cities in England and France, such as Liverpool, Manchester and Bordeaux. It was key to London’s emergence as a global capital of commerce, and spurred New York’s rise as a center of finance. The industry to construct, fund, staff, and administer the thousands of ships which made close to 50,000 individual voyages was alone a herculean task. The international financial and distribution networks required to coordinate, maintain and profit from slavery set the framework for the modern global economy.

2) Africans’ economic skills were a leading reason for their enslavement.
Africans possessed unique expertise which Europeans required to make their colonial ventures successful. Africans knew how to grow and cultivate crops in tropical and semi-tropical climates. African rice growers, for instance, were captured in order to bring their agricultural knowledge to America’s sea islands and those of the Caribbean. Many West African civilizations possessed goldsmiths and expert metal workers on a grand scale. These slaves were snatched to work in Spanish and Portuguese gold and silver mines throughout Central and South America. Contrary to the myth of unskilled labor, large numbers of Africans were anything but.

3) African know-how transformed slave economies into some of the wealthiest on the planet.
The fruits of the slave trade funded the growth of global empires. The greatest source of wealth for imperial France was the “white gold” of sugar produced by Africans in Haiti. More riches flowed to Britain from the slave economy of Jamaica than all of the original American 13 colonies combined. Those resources underwrote the Industrial Revolution and vast improvements in Western Europe’s economic infrastructure.

4) Until it was destroyed by the Civil War, slavery made the American South the richest and most powerful region in America.
Slavery was a national enterprise, but the economic and political center of gravity during the U.S.’s first incarnation as a slave republic was the South. This was true even during the colonial era. Virginia was its richest colony and George Washington was one of its wealthiest people because of his slaves. The majority of the new country’s presidents and Supreme Court justices were Southerners.

However, the invention of the cotton gin took the South’s national economic dominance and transformed it into a global phenomenon. British demand for American cotton, as I have written before, made the southern stretch of the Mississippi River the Silicon Valley of its era. The single largest concentration of America’s millionaires was gathered in plantations along the Mississippi’s banks. The first and only president of the Confederacy—Jefferson Davis—was a Mississippi, millionaire slave holder.

5) Defense of slavery, more than taxes, was pivotal to America’s declaration of independence.
The South had long resisted Northern calls to leave the British Empire. That’s because the South sold most of its slave-produced products to Britain and relied on the British Navy to protect the slave trade. But a court case in England changed all of that. In 1775, a British court ruled that slaves could not be held in the United Kingdom against their will. Fearing that the ruling would apply to the American colonies, the Southern planters swung behind the Northern push for greater autonomy. In 1776, one year later, America left its former colonial master. The issue of slavery was so powerful that it changed the course of history.

6) The brutalization and psychological torture of slaves was designed to ensure that plantations stayed in the black financially.
Slave revolts and acts of sabotage were relatively common on Southern plantations. As economic enterprises, the disruption in production was bad for business. Over time a system of oppression emerged to keep things humming along. This centered on singling out slaves for public torture who had either participated in acts of defiance or who tended towards noncompliance. In fact, the most recalcitrant slaves were sent to institutions, such as the “Sugar House” in Charleston, S.C., where cruelty was used to elicit cooperation. Slavery’s most inhumane aspects were just another tool to guarantee the bottom line.

7) The economic success of former slaves during Reconstruction led to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan.
In less than 10 years after the end of slavery, blacks created thriving communities and had gained political power—including governorships and Senate seats—across the South. Former slaves, such Atlanta’s Alonzo Herndon, had even become millionaires in the post-war period. But the move towards black economic empowerment had upset the old economic order. Former planters organized themselves into White Citizens Councils and created an armed wing—the Ku Klux Klan—to undermine black economic institutions and to force blacks into sharecropping on unfair terms. Isabel Wilkerson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “The Warmth of Other Suns”, details the targeting of black individuals, as well as entire black communities, for acts of terror whose purpose was to enforce economic apartheid.

8) The desire to maintain economic oppression is why the South was one of the most anti-tax regions of the nation.
Before the Civil War, the South routinely blocked national infrastructure protects. These plans, focused on Northern and Western states, would have moved non-slave goods to market quickly and cheaply. The South worried that such investments would increase the power of the free-labor economy and hurt their own, which was based on slavery. Moreover, the South was vehemently opposed to taxes even to improve the lives of non-slaveholding white citizens. The first public school in the North, Boston Latin, opened its doors in the mid-1600s. The first public school in the South opened 200 years later. Maintenance of slavery was the South’s top priority to the detriment of everything else.

9) Many firms on Wall Street made fortunes from funding the slave trade.
Investment in slavery was one of the most profitable economic activities throughout most of New York’s 350 year history. Much of the financing for the slave economy flowed through New York banks. Marquee names such as JP Morgan Chase and New York Life all profited greatly from slavery. Lehman Brothers, one of Wall Street’s largest firms until 2008, got its start in the slave economy of Alabama. Slavery was so important to the city that New York was one the most pro-slavery urban municipalities in the North.

10) The wealth gap between whites and blacks, the result of slavery, has yet to be closed.
The total value of slaves, or “property” as they were then known, could exceed $12 million in today’s dollars on the largest plantations. With land, machinery, crops and buildings added in, the wealth of southern agricultural enterprises was truly astronomical. Yet when slavery ended, the people that generated the wealth received nothing.

The country has struggled with the implications of this inequity ever since. With policy changes in Washington since 1865, sometimes this economic gulf has narrowed and sometimes it’s widened, but the economic difference has never been erased. Today, the wealth gap between whites and blacks is the largest recorded since records began to be kept three decades ago.

The Ability to Break Chains

I hear The Chains Breaking

Please read this re-posted article from Cheryl Snapp Conner, a frequent speaker and author on reputation and thought leadership.  It touched me in knowing what is needed to break invisible chains that can prevent potential.

1.    Waste Time Feeling Sorry for Themselves. You don’t see mentally strong people feeling sorry for their circumstances or dwelling on the way they’ve been mistreated. They have learned to take responsibility for their actions and outcomes, and they have an inherent understanding of the fact that frequently life is not fair. They are able to emerge from trying circumstances with self-awareness and gratitude for the lessons learned. When a situation turns out badly, they respond with phrases such as “Oh, well.” Or perhaps simply, “Next!”

2. Give Away Their Power. Mentally strong people avoid giving others the power to make them feel inferior or bad. They understand they are in control of their actions and emotions. They know their strength is in their ability to manage the way they respond.

3.    Shy Away from Change. Mentally strong people embrace change and they welcome challenge. Their biggest “fear,” if they have one, is not of the unknown, but of becoming complacent and stagnant. An environment of change and even uncertainty can energize a mentally strong person and bring out their best.

4. Waste Energy on Things They Can’t Control. Mentally strong people don’t complain (much) about bad traffic, lost luggage, or especially about other people, as they recognize that all of these factors are generally beyond their control. In a bad situation, they recognize that the one thing they can always control is their own response and attitude, and they use these attributes well.

5. Worry About Pleasing Others. Know any people pleasers? Or, conversely, people who go out of their way to dis-please others as a way of reinforcing an image of strength? Neither position is a good one. A mentally strong person strives to be kind and fair and to please others where appropriate, but is unafraid to speak up. They are able to withstand the possibility that someone will get upset and will navigate the situation, wherever possible, with grace. It takes much practice to hone mental strength

6. Fear Taking Calculated Risks. A mentally strong person is willing to take calculated risks. This is a different thing entirely than jumping headlong into foolish risks. But with mental strength, an individual can weigh the risks and benefits thoroughly, and will fully assess the potential downsides and even the worst-case scenarios before they take action.

7. Dwell on the Past. There is strength in acknowledging the past and especially in acknowledging the things learned from past experiences—but a mentally strong person is able to avoid miring their mental energy in past disappointments or in fantasies of the “glory days” gone by. They invest the majority of their energy in creating an optimal present and future.

8. Make the Same Mistakes Over and Over. We all know the definition of insanity, right? It’s when we take the same actions again and again while hoping for a different and better outcome than we’ve gotten before. A mentally strong person accepts full responsibility for past behavior and is willing to learn from mistakes. Research shows that the ability to be self-reflective in an accurate and productive way is one of the greatest strengths of spectacularly successful executives and entrepreneurs.

9. Resent Other People’s Success. It takes strength of character to feel genuine joy and excitement for other people’s success. Mentally strong people have this ability. They don’t become jealous or resentful when others succeed (although they may take close notes on what the individual did well). They are willing to work hard for their own chances at success, without relying on shortcuts.

10. Give Up After Failure. Every failure is a chance to improve. Even the greatest entrepreneurs are willing to admit that their early efforts invariably brought many failures. Mentally strong people are willing to fail again and again, if necessary, as long as the learning experience from every “failure” can bring them closer to their ultimate goals.

11. Fear Alone Time. Mentally strong people enjoy and even treasure the time they spend alone. They use their downtime to reflect, to plan, and to be productive. Most importantly, they don’t depend on others to shore up their happiness and moods. They can be happy with others, and they can also be happy alone.

12. Feel the World Owes Them Anything. Particularly in the current economy, executives and employees at every level are gaining the realization that the world does not owe them a salary, a benefits package and a comfortable life, regardless of their preparation and schooling. Mentally strong people enter the world prepared to work and succeed on their merits, at every stage of the game.

13. Expect Immediate Results. Whether it’s a workout plan, a nutritional regimen, or starting a business, mentally strong people are “in it for the long haul”. They know better than to expect immediate results. They apply their energy and time in measured doses and they celebrate each milestone and increment of success on the way. They have “staying power.” And they understand that genuine changes take time.

Life is what we make of it, in the short time we are given here on earth.  Make a Difference.

Dewitt RobinsonDewitt Robinson | Blogging For Fun And Change

A Scandal That's Exposing Ugly Truths About the School Privatization Agenda

August 16, 2013  |  

Written by:   David Sirota for the alternet.org website.  He is a best-selling author of the new book "Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now." He also hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado.

  

The recent scandal ousting Florida's top education official shows the privatization movement is about profits.

Paradoxes come in all different forms, but here’s one that perfectly fits this Gilded Age: The most significant lesson from the ongoing debate about American education has little to do with schools and everything to do with money. This lesson comes from a series of recent scandals that expose the financial motives of the leaders of the so-called education “reform” movement — the one that is trying to privatize public schools.

The first set of scandals engulfed Tony Bennett, the former Indiana school superintendent and much-vaunted poster boy for the privatization push. After voters in that state responded to his radical agenda by throwing him out of office, he was quickly hired to lead Florida’s education system. At the same time, his wife not-so-coincidentally landed a gig with the Florida-based Charter Schools USA, a for-profit company that not only has an obvious interest in Bennett privatizing Florida schools, but that also was previously awarded lucrative contracts by Bennett in Indiana.

Grotesque as it is to shroud such self-enriching graft in the veneer of helping children, the self-dealing controversy wasn’t Bennett’s most revealing scandal. That distinction goes to recent news that Bennett changed the grades of privately run charter schools on behalf of his financial backers. Indeed, as the Associated Press reported, “When it appeared an Indianapolis charter school run by a prominent Republican donor might receive a poor grade, Bennett’s education team frantically overhauled his signature ‘A-F’ school grading system to improve the school’s marks.” Yet, the Associated Press also reported that just a year before, Bennett “declined to give two Indianapolis public schools (the) same flexibility.”

In response, the American Federation of Teachers is asking Indiana to release emails between Bennett and the education foundation run by former Gov. Jeb Bush, R-Fla., another prominent face of the “reform” movement. The union is requesting this correspondence because of another scandal, this one publicized by the Washington Post.

Under the headline “E-mails Link Bush Foundation, Corporations and Education Officials,” the newspaper earlier this year reported on correspondence showing the foundation carefully shaping its education “reform” agenda not around policies that would most help children, but around legislation that would most quickly expand the profit margins of its donors in the for-profit education industry.

Before all of these controversies, of course, there were plenty of ways to see that something other than concern for kids has been driving “reformers’” push to privatize public schools.

You could, for example, contrast privatizers’ pro-charter-school propaganda with Stanford University’s study showing that most charter schools perform no better — and often worse — than traditional public schools.

You could juxtapose the Reuters story screaming “Private Firms Eyeing Profits From U.S. Public Schools” next to the New York Times headline blaring “Hedge Funds’ Leaders Rally for Charter Schools.”

You could consider that the most prolific fundraiser in the education “reform” movement is not someone with a stellar record of education policy success, but instead Michelle Rhee, the former Washington, D.C., schools chief whose tenure was defined by a massive cheating scandal.

But maybe the best way to see that profit is the motive of the education “reform” movement is to note that no matter how many kids they harm or how many scandals they create, Bennett, Bush, Rhee and other privatizers continue getting jobs, continue being touted as education “experts” and continue raising huge money for their cause.

Thanks to that dynamic, education politics is spotlighting a fact that should be taught in every civics class. It is a fact that contradicts the pervasive rhetoric about meritocracy, but it is, alas, a fact: If you are backed by enough money, you will almost always retain your status in America — no matter how wrong you are and how many lives you ruin.

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