We are all the architects of our own situation many times in life. If it was going to be an easy, cookie cutter trip through it all, we would never learn anything. Life is a journey... Not a guided tour. I can't count the number of bad decisions that I have made in my life, both moral and lifestyle. Now an old fart, I am starting to finally get some of it, but likely most the big picture will likely elude me until the end. You start out as a raw block of stone, and life chips away at you, finally revealing who you are. Were it not for those blows to chip away bits an pieces, what is inside would never be revealed. But while I am a big proponent of learning from mistakes... some never seem to... I am not a big proponent of beating yourself up for choices that you made in the past. It is an exercise in futility, assuming that you learned something and aren't going to do the same thing again. All that is left to us is to learn and move forward. Anything else, unless it is the sharing of that knowledge with others so they don't step in the same holes, is a waste of thought and effort.

There will always be people that think that we got into this because of our own bad decision making. Some of us did to deny that negates the ability to learn from it. But how does that change things today now that the damage is done? In no way that is productive.

Good judgement comes from experience, you are not born with it. Experience comes from bad judgement. It is just part of the path. As to David's comment about his ability to grasp things, I can only say that our knowledge, his,mine, and everyone else's, is evolving. We re all trying to get our minds around new ideas all the time if we really care about our journey, let alone helping others through theirs. David cares or he wouldn't be here. But lack of knowledge of something hardly means that you came from the shallow end of the gene pool. There is a big difference between ignorance and stupidity. I can't count how ignorant I feel everything I am at a cancer conference with the really bright. But I try to absorb as much as possible. We all need to be better tomorrow than we are today. What others think of us and our situation maters not, and those that don't get it don't merit the argument.