Fight Entitlement

Americans have this view of themselves as powerful, as winners, as good people in a good country.  They've come to expect opportunity to come at them.  Our constitution gurantees us certain rights.  Our celebrity culture generates a want to be worshipped.  Our labor unions generate job security.  There are all these systems set up that enable people to feel great, honorable, worthy, and entitled without necessarily doing anything to earn it. 

Rights are meant to protect us from unjust suffering.  They aren't meant to make us think we can do (or not do) anything we want and be rewarded for it.  You are not special because you're an American.  You are simply lucky.  You are certainly not a better person by being American, nor by being wealthy or famous.  The only true way to deserve what you have is to earn it.

All people should have the rights to respect, courtesy, safety, freedom.  But even these can be taken away or witheld.  Even these must sometimes be earned.

But most "rights" should always be earned.  You do not have the right to a job, education, reward, or opinion if you have done nothing to earn it.  You do not have a right to your job if you aren't doing it well.  I don't care what that job is, whether you pick up trash, teach children, put out fires, grow food, or run a country-- if you suck at your job, you don't have a right to keep it. 

If you enter a competition and lose, you don't get a trophy.  If you haven't contributed anything valuable to society, you shouldn't be famous.  If you spend two dollars on a random lottery ticket, you don't deserve 50 million dollars for it.  If you aren't actively trying to learn, no one will want to teach you.  If all you do is tear others down, you shouldn't speak.  If all you do is take and not give, what do you really deserve?  Who wants to spend their time on someone who will take that time and waste it?

There is nothing about you- not your wealth, your intelligence, your job, your social status, your friend count on Facebook, your awards, your parents, your country, your fame, your ideals, your advantages, your disadvantages-- nothing that makes you a better person than anyone else, nothing except your actions.  What will you do to benefit others?  What will you do to contribute to the betterment of your little part of the world? 

You deserve less than you think, and you will be given even less than that.  So don't expect someone else to save you, heal you, teach you, make you, or love you if you aren't going to go out there and do the same for them.  Engage the world.  Prove your worth.  You are not entitled.