When fifteen thousand is better than a million!

When fifteen thousand is better than a million!

On vacation on August 16^th, 2009 and really chillin’ out! Early today I was watching Drop Dead Diva. Evidently it is about a girl who died and when she got to the afterlife she reached over the counter and hit the return button. That event threw her body back into the body of another person, an intelligent slightly overweight female lawyer (by the way, prior to her death and return she must have been a model, hence diva maybe?).

Anyway in the episode I was watching it was her birthday, only the new body she is in has her turning 32, but she would’ve been 24 in her previous (model) body. In a slightly parallel situation she is given a client who she has to represent who has just been released from a 10 year prison sentence for a crime he didn’t commit. See the parallel; both she and her client have had a number of years taken from their lives.

The wrongfully incarcerated individual has been offered $15,000.00 for his loss, but that seems way too little for ten years of lost life, way too little to the lawyer anyway. So in the next scene the “drop-dead diva” convinces the guy to fight for more money, she tells him as they are walking into the courtroom that he looks like a million bucks and that is what he deserves!

I left the room to go and play shuffleboard with my kids at that point in the show, so I have no idea what happens next, but I thought about that story the rest of the day. Taking the $15,000.00 would’ve been so much better than the million bucks. In America today we have lost a proper understanding of the value of an earned dollar and we have a screwed up idea of the value of a free or gifted dollar.

I recently read somewhere that life is 10 percent what happens to you and 90 percent how you respond to it, I guess that is true. The problem is we don’t see a handout as a bad thing that happens to a person anymore, instead we think that free government assistance is a good thing but I think it is usually a trap.

I told a friend the other day that I was afraid that his disability settlement and check was going to kill him. I am afraid that he will lose the drive and desire to get back to work, and in turn that he will simply live off the little stipend that he receives from the government. Oh I pray that handout doesn’t steal his life away. Pray for my friend, we’ll call him Chris for now.