> I personally
> know people
> who have lost everything because of circumstance they could not control.
No doubt. I know such people too. I also know people who lost everything because they did not give a shit and preferred to stay home, shoot drugs, drink beer, watch tee-vee, and sponge off their relatives and friends - and I bet that you know such people as well.
So what does it tell us? That we need to look at individual cases instead of making sweeping generalizations. For the record, I was responding to a posting making such sweeping generalizations from one's experience by pointing out that my experience was different. It is telling that nobody on this list responded to the first kind of generalization, but people find generalizations (which I did not make) of my case offensive. That tells me that we are not talking about facts anymore but about religious convictions.
Wojtek