Mens Sana Foundation

what I’ve been hearing and reading lately, there are people in this country who are deemed to be less fortunate. Now I don’t know who they are because the folks who use that term never seem to get around to identifying them. But from the context involved, I would say that they mean people without money. In other words, the poor.

Anyway, if those folks are less fortunate, then the rest of us have got to be either fortunate or more fortunate. Right?

And so in the context of wealth, presumably the middle class constitutes the fortunate and the rich the more fortunate.

Now let’s see what it means to be fortunate, so we can determine how the middle class and the rich got to be that way.

Well, according to Webster’s, "fortune" means beyond anyone’s control. You know, luck, chance, the roll of the dice.

So in the context of wealth, if you’re fortunate, money will come to you whether you lift a finger or not. If you’re less fortunate, money will stay away from you no matter how hard you work. And if you’re more fortunate, you can sit at home contemplating your navel and money will continuously flow to you in enormous quantities.

Now that’s really nice to know. Because if you ever get to meet Michael Jordan, or Warren Buffet or Bill Gates or Oprah Winfrey or Donald Trump or Bill Cosby, and you want to impress that person with the level of your intelligence, you could greet him or her with something like, "How ya doin’, ya lucky (or incredibly lucky) so and so?"

Oh, by the way, I wouldn’t do that with Dennis Rodman, George Foreman, or Mike Tyson, if I were you. ’Cause if you do, you might turn out to be, well, less fortunate.

Think about it.