Back before the internet, before smartphones, I learned my first real lesson about how the world works. I was a teenager, and I had a job at a local burger joint. It wasn’t glamorous, but it was mine. I rode my bike seven miles from my house to get there every day, because that was what it took. Every year, the company ran a contest for us hourly workers. They gave us these little coupons to hand out. You would put your name on them, give them to customers, and at the end of the contest, the employee whose name was on the most returned coupons would win a bonus. A month’s pay. For a kid making minimum wage, that was a fortune. It was the difference between just getting by and having a real shot at something.
For a month, I gave it everything I had. I worked the swing shift. 11 to 2, then back again from 5 to close. That meant hours between shifts to kill. Most kids would go hang out, maybe grab a nap in their car. I didn’t have a car. I had a bike.
So I would get off my first shift, and instead of resting, I would get back on that bike and pedal five miles out to the interstate. I would hit every gas station, every rest stop, leaving my coupons anywhere a hungry traveler might find them. Then I would turn around and pedal five miles back to the restaurant, just in time to clock in for the dinner rush. After closing, I would make that final seven-mile ride home in the dark.
Seven miles there. Five to the interstate. Five back. Seven home. I did this day after day. I was playing by the rules, working harder than I ever had, and it was working. When the numbers were posted, I was in the lead by over 80 coupons. Eighty. I had earned that lead.
There was another kid who worked there. His family had money. We all knew it. He drove a nice car, had nice clothes. He was quite the spoiled kid, and he lived in a different world. On the very last day of the contest, his mother walked in. She didn’t have a bike. She didn’t have a stack of coupons. She had a checkbook. She wrote a check for enough burgers and fries to get a mountain of those last-day coupons. Her son’s name went on every single one. They blew past my 80-coupon lead in an afternoon.
I didn’t have a checking account. ATMs were scarce. Even if I had, my parents sure didn’t have a pile of cash lying around to buy a contest. The management knew that. They watched it happen, smiled, and handed the prize to the rich kid. My work, the miles on that bike, the split shifts, the early mornings and late nights. It all meant nothing. Erased by a signature on a check.
For years, I carried that anger. But eventually, something shifted. I started thinking about what that moment really taught me. I was a conservative kid. Still am, in a lot of ways. I believed in self-reliance. I believed that if you worked harder than the next guy, you ought to come out ahead. That was the deal. That was America. But here’s what I couldn’t shake. The rich kid didn’t work harder. His mother worked a checkbook. And the system didn’t just allow it. It celebrated it. The winner wasn’t the one who hustled. The winner was the one whose family could buy the prize. And that got me thinking about other things I believed in. I believed in the right to keep and bear arms, for example. Not because I was paranoid, but because I believed that a person should have the means to defend themselves and their family against anyone who might try to take what was theirs. Whether that was a burglar or a tyrant. It was about balance of power. It was about ensuring that no one could simply impose their will on you because they had more resources or more force at their disposal.
Now here’s the thing I started to realize years later. The same principle applies in places we don’t always think about. When power and wealth concentrate too heavily, whether it’s in a corporation, an industry, or a family that can buy a contest, the rest of us lose something. We lose the ability to protect what we’ve earned. We lose the assurance that our hard work will actually matter. That burger joint contest taught me that any system, left completely unchecked, stops rewarding merit and starts rewarding the people who start closest to the finish line. And if you believe in self-reliance, if you believe a person ought to be able to defend what’s theirs, then you ought to be troubled by that. I still believe in hard work. I still believe in America. But I also believe that communities need to watch out for each other. That ordinary people need a voice. That the rules of the game ought to be fair, not just for the ones who can write a check, but for the kid on the bike who’s putting in fifty miles a day for a shot at something better.
Because that kid deserved better than a rich kid’s checkbook. And the values that tell you that, fairness, self-reliance, the right to keep what you earn, those don’t belong to any one political party. They belong to anyone who believes in a fair shake and a fighting chance.