Okay, I’m sick of this constant reference to “working men and women,” code words for people who made a deliberate decision not to educate themselves and ended up with 9-5 jobs paying wages due to the choices they made early in life.

I’ve dug ditches for a living. I’ve bussed and waited tables for a living. I’ve served my country in the military for a living. I know what it’s like to live from paycheck to paycheck. Oh, and by the way, while I was doing all that, I was going to college part time to advance myself. Why, because I realized my foolish decision to quit college after high school was a mistake. I did it and I paid my dues for doing so. In the end, I bettered myself.

After paying these dues, I joined a company, worked very hard at it, and at great risk to myself and my family, I invested in that company by buying into it over time. There were many times I thought it might fail. And at it’s most vulnerable time, just when it looked like I was going to lose it all, I invested more. Eventually it succeeded and I was handsomely rewarded for it when we sold the company.

I never worked harder in my life than when I was trying to grow that business. There were months at a time when I never took a day off–not even Sunday. I was a working man. I worked and I worried that it all might be for naught.

Please stop telling me that because I was a businessman I was not a working man! Just because you work at a factory for lower wages doesn’t mean you work any harder than me. You don’t. While you were working your hourly job, coming home and drinking your beer and smoking your cigarettes, demanding from your “greedy” boss that you be given more time off and more health care, I was still at the office trying to figure out how to not only keep my business alive, but how to create more jobs.

Quit your whining. You made your decisions. Now live with them.