OPPORTUNITY!

1. a set of circumstances that makes it possible to do something.

   "we may see increased opportunities for export"

   synonyms:

   chance, lucky chance, favorable time/occasion/moment, time, right set of circumstances, occasion, moment, opening, option, window (of opportunity), turn, go, possibility; More informalshot, break, new lease on life "this is your opportunity to move on"

   • a chance for employment or promotion.

     "career opportunities in our New York headquarters"

      I have been promised opportunities by fortune cookies, by advertisements, by telemarketers; friends have invited me into the great multilevel marketing opportunities that they received--my lottery ticket provides me a 1:175,000,000 chance to become rich beyond my dreams. 

      

     America really is the land of opportunity.

     
     

     But if you look for poor people that became rich, you get things like

     "15 billionaires that started out dirt poor"

     • Kenny Trout, whose father was a bartender and sold life insurance to pay his own tuition through college."  He had Excel phone company (multi-level marketing company, the kind where the top gets rich and the bottom lose their investment) and made 3.5 billion in the merger with another company. From Texas, white, republican.
     • Howard Schultz of Starbucks fame--grew up in a housing complex for the poor (that says project to me, but his father was a truckdriver which is working class), won a football scholarship and went to work for  xerox.  Then became a CEO of a 16 branch coffee place and grew it to huge. Jewish family in Brooklyn.
     • Ken Langone, parents were a plumber and a cafeteria worker in New York (that was middle-class in my world, blue collar not white), parents mortgaged their house (they had a house to mortgage) and he worked to go to college, he worked with Ross Perot then partnered to create Home Depot. 
     • Oprah Winfrey, born in a poor family in Mississippi, scholarship to college, then a job in TV with a well known rise to fame and money. 
     • Shahid Khan, from Pakistan, worked as a dishwasher while attending the U of C, now worth 3.8 billion.(working your way through college doesn't say poor to me, but most of this story is missing--in Pakistan, his parents were middle-class, father in construction, mother a professor of mathematics) 
     • Kirk Kerkorkian, To financially help his Armenian-immigrant family, Kerkorian dropped out of school in the eighth grade and later would become a boxer called "Rifle Right Kerkorian." During World War II, Kerkorian worked for Britain's Royal Air Force. He eventually turned his interest to constructing many of Las Vegas' biggest resorts and hotels. 
     • John Paul DeJoria, the man behind a hair-care empire and Patron Tequila, once lived in a foster home and his car. Net worth: $4 billion (as of Sept. 2013) Do Won Chang worked as a janitor, gas station attendant, and in a coffee shop when he first moved to America. He and his wife made Forever 21--Paul Mitchell Hair Products.
       
     • Ralph Lauren was once a clerk at Brooks Brothers dreaming of men's ties. Born in the Bronx to Jewish Immigrant, blue collar family.  Net worth: $7.7 billion.

     • Simmons grew up in a "shack" without plumbing or electricity--his parents were both school teachers. He managed to get accepted to the University of Texas where he earned a bachelor's and masters in economics.  Simmons got his first big break buying a chain of drugstores, which would later sell for $50 million. He went on to become an expert in corporate buyouts.  Big anti-environmentalist, white republican.
     • Larry Ellison, born in Brooklyn, N.Y., to a single jewish mother, Ellison was adopted by his middle-class aunt and uncle in Chicago . After his aunt died, Ellison dropped out of college and moved to California to work odd jobs for the next eight years. He founded software development company Oracle in 1977, which is now one of the largest technology companies in the world.

     So, the list is shorter than 15 due to the others were not in the good ole US of A.  And "dirt poor" seems to have been an exaggeration--only three of them would qualify by my reckoning though none were well-off. 

      First-generation immigrants seem to have a good chance, and being white and male is helpful.  But Oprah is on there.   And out of 1300+ billionaires, well, less than 1% started out with  little and made it big.. That is less than 1% of billionaires, not 1% of people and definitely not 1% of poor and working class people in the USA.  The poor comprise 20-25% of the population, about 46.5 million people.  The working class comprises about twice that number. 

     
     

     The lottery is not that much more of a long-shot than me taking myself from poor or working-class to rich.  And, yes, I realize that there are a lot of people that have made it somewhere between that 55th percentile and the 90th (where the millionaires live).  I also realize that it is harder now than it was.  How many of those self-starters used college as a springboard.  Now the minimum wage jobs are as full of college graduates as drop-outs and high school students.  Companies do not reward loyalty, do not try to offer opportunities to those people already under their employee, do not make sure that creativity and hardwork (now just products of work, with bonuses to those higher up for bringing in more cash or better ideas). How many of us have researched or created something only to have our immediate supervisors or their immediate supervisors present and take all the credit.  They may rise through the company on the thing I did.  It usually just means that the next time something tough comes up, it gets added to my already full plate.  My opportunity is to work harder.  Harder work with no real payoff.

     
     

     We need our opportunities back, we need to feel the hope of improving our lot in life and our children's lives.