Yep. And any complaint anyone has about anything in their life comes down to the choices they've made, right? So whining about the price of gas pinching you because you have to drive to work is equivalent whining about the color you decided to paint your livingroom.

Every problem in the world comes down to someone else's bitc*ing, this is what I'm getting at. And that's infantile and pathetic. That's how I used to think out on the schoolyard. "Quit your whining" should be our national motto. The price of gas, having to drive, these are not cut-and-dry choices we simply make the same as we do what brand of tp to buy. The infrastructure and planning of our entire freaking nation is petroleum based, and people are trying to tell me the price of gas being a problem comes down to nothing else but personal choice? Right.

And that's what you're saying, but you're throwing in the next tired argument against the powerless: they're poor because they make stupid choices. Our lives are a sum of our economic decisions? People who, say, live near a chemical plant and complain about getting cancer from breathing the air, they live there because they made choices in their life that put them there, so it's their own fault, so they should shut up? No bike lanes in your city? You made the economic choices that put you in that city, if you don't like it, shut up and make the choices that allow you to move to a city with bike lanes.

If only everyone would just have the willpower to make the choices they need to make to be where they want to be, there wouldn't be any problems. Poverty and powerlessness are a choice.

Yeah? I know it follows logically, that's the rhetorical end-point, is that what you guys believe? I mean, that's pretty much how the nation works politically, I would expect a lot of people to think that way. Especially folks who think a nation built from the ground up to move by car offers endless car-lite or car-free options to anyone or everyone.