Debt Free or Bust Comments Off
This blog was intended to be my journey through my career crises and money problems. I meant for it to be a tool to help me more than anything else. On my end, it is continuing to be that kind of blog.
Recently, a few readers have become verbally abusive of my life and circumstances, and have left nasty and even cruel comments. They don’t understand the internet business world and how it works. They don’t understand that niche ideas are equivalent to industrial trade secrets.
They also fail to see that I have two businesses. I’m not unemployed or drawing unemployment benefits. I tutor math and science to middle and high school students and make a pretty decent living doing it. Tutoring is my primary source of income right now.
I haven’t apparently been clear enough with my readers that tutoring is extremely busy during the months of December and May. December is mid-term exams and May is final exams. I spend little time online during those two months.
School year 2008-2009 was unusual because of Hurricane Gustav. Students missed 15 days of school in September, and schedules were changed substantially. We were waiting for power and other services to be restored. Students had less time off on Thanksgiving break, Christmas break, Mardi Gras and in May to make up those days. That left me far less online catch-up time during the school year. Even though content production suffered because of it, my income increased.
Now that I’m tutoring on my own, I’ve had to set up the tutoring business and that takes time offline. I’ve only had 20 days to set things up on the fly as I see students and figure out how I want to run things. I’m doing a lot of the same things as my previous boss, but I am changing a couple of things. My prices are $5/hr cheaper on each package because I believe she raised her prices at the wrong time this past school year. In a recession, prices have to be more competitive, so I went back to the prices she used the year before this one and had used for a few years. They make me a little more competitive with the companies out there. I also get to keep all the revenue which resulted in a big raise for me.
Because some readers are fairly ignorant about what I’m doing with my time, they believe they know what is best for me in my life than I do, and proceed to tell me all about their lives and how I should do things there way. I’m accused of being lazy and unemployed. I am neither.
Comments are off because:
- Businesses are real jobs.
- I don’t owe anyone an explanation of exactly how I spend every minute of my time.
- I don’t owe anyone an explanation of what time I take off and how I spend that time.
- I don’t have to answer to anyone about what I choose to watch on TV.
- Just because I publish what I’m doing online does not give anyone the right to beat me up verbally.
- I’m spending far too much time answering these nasty comments, and that takes away from both my businesses, raises my blood pressure and raises my anger level too far.
- These comments set off my chronic depression. When my depression is worse, I have a much harder time writing and getting other tasks done. It’s tough enough to get out of bed without being kicked.
- Therefore, I don’t need a small chorus of assholes making things worse.
I have no explanation for why people are so cruel with so little empathy for the plights of others less fortunate than they are, nor why they think they can get online on someone’s blog and proceed to figuratively tear them to shreds. I see this cruelty and lack of empathy more often than I ever have. It seems to go along with what happened during the last 8 years during the George W. Bush administration:
- The rich got much richer and far less generous (philanthropy is down considerably).
- The middle class became disenfranchised and some became poor or working class.
- The middle class bore the brunt of taxes while corporations and the rich took their earnings offshore to avoid paying any taxes at all.
- The living standard of the middle class declined.
- The real income of the middle class declined (and this is probably why philanthropic giving declined; the middle class is more generous than many of the rich).
- The rhetoric against anyone having financial trouble and getting and keeping jobs is some kind of moral failing on their part and is condescending and cruel.
- Poverty is a moral failing of those who are poor, and these people need to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. That’s hard to do when you don’t have any boots.
- To those doing well, jobs and financial problems have nothing to do with the economy or the robbery of the public by the conglomerated financial system from which the wealthy benefited the most.
Now the far right and other religious and anti-government extremists have set a tone in this country for domestic terrorism: hate crimes and violent rhetoric which have led and are leading to murder of other American citizens. There were three domestic terrorist related murders over just 11 days in the past two weeks.
This nasty and dangerous rhetoric is spilling over into non-violent but still inflammatory speech, and the anonymity of the internet is propagating it into verbal attacks on individuals who are not anonymous on their blogs, websites and social media pages.
So, comments will not be accepted on this blog until further notice. I don’t have the time or energy to deal with this much bullpuckey.
