Well said, TY.
I look at it from the other perspective, I'm at the age that all my sign mentors are dying off....it seems every other month there's a funeral.
These guys had an unhealthy job, smoked cigarettes, drank coffee all day long and ate whatever cr@p the food truck had that day, drank too many beers
that night and came in hung-over to do it all again the next day. Yes, they're paying the price now, but I doubt any of them would have changed a thing.
It kind of chaps my @ss that some consider those guys a drain on society when they put into the system but never really got to enjoy retirement.
I'm in my mid-50's and most of my mentors are gone, but that's the age we're at. Nobody thought about how their diet, habits and such would affect them as they aged. Hell, these dudes stormed the beaches at Normandy, or elsewhere.
In the inner city Chicago neighborhood I grew up in was a little corner market just like every other neighborhood had. Next to it was an old fashioned sign painter just like every neighborhood had. For thousands of years, signmaking has been a very public and storefront kind of business. As a kid, I'd press my face up against the window and watch him work. I was artistic but from a very blue collar upbringing, so I imagined this was a viable, achievable vocation for me. To this day, that belief is still the reason I get up in the morning. The dude was always covered in paint and the shop was a total mess. But I fell in love with the grace and skill he used his brushes with. He probably didn't think about all the OneShot that he was soaking up through his perpetually paint soaked hands, or the fumes in the air, or the sanded edges of boards, etc. It killed him.
In one way or another, any of us could become a drain on society for a whole host of reasons, many that are out of our control. The fact that most of us aren't can be contributed to lots of different factors and a lot of dumb luck in many cases. The people that don't believe that just haven't ever had something really awful happen to them that they had nothing to do with causing.
Whether you admit it or not, we also are all part of a union of states, under one flag and one set of overriding goals. You know, life, liberty and all that freedom jazz. Thankfully, we're not Somalia or some other disjointed nation where only the physically strong and armed survive. I'm happy to prove my loyalty to my nation by agreeing to fork over a reasonable amount of taxes so those far less able, fortunate or struck by something awful aren't left in the gutter like many were before our nation created a social safety net.