I'm all expounded out. Trying to take care of myself and family has been a full-time job, and kept me awake at nights for as long as I can remember. It's tortured my soul and probably wrecked my health. It isn't enough you have to be willing and able to work, and also have skills that the society needs, but you have to depend on external social and economic forces over which you have absolutely no control. I don't have to tell any of you people this, you do it too.

I'm a lucky man, I just happened, by sheer luck, to catch the tail end of the most prosperous and extraordinary period in world history, in a country blessed with freedom and abundance. It has allowed me to pull myself up from the poverty of my youth and family. If I had been born a few years later I would have missed it. I was lucky enough to have served in a war from which I emerged with no blood on my hands, unscathed and intact in both body and mind, which now gives me access to benefits that are desperately scarce today. I was fortunate to have been interested in academic subjects that allowed me to engage in useful, interesting, rewarding, and dignified labor throughout my life. I had the very great fortune to have been brought up in a culture and a family that honored intelligence, education, thrift and hard work, and had a healthy mistrust of those whose wealth was based on the labor of others, the manipulation of money or the dubious arts of the middleman. And I was fortunate enough to have had an education that taught me not only what I needed to know, but how to think for myself. And I've done it all without taking anything from anyone or profiting off anyone elses labor.

I've had a good life, a good wife, good friends, and a sharp mind, with just enough pride to glory in them but not so much I dare claim it as all my doing alone. I've made mistakes and and done things I'm ashamed of, but on the whole I've lived well, honorably,and done my best to hurt no one. And I played by the rules the cards I was dealt.

So yes, I AM entitled to it. It's not like I had it dumped in my lap without having worked and paid for it along the way.