A bulldozer. To take down a few tents. A piece of equipment that probably costs thousands and thousands of dollars to insure and maintain, and they used it on some Coleman tents and cardboard lean-tos. They wasted thousands of dollars, taxpayer dollars, to make a show of force.
In other places, the police have arrested and/or beaten everyone from Iraq war vets to retired state Supreme Court justices. They took the press badges from any reporters trying to cover the eviction of the Occupy Wall Street protesters. This is in the same country that's made a point of claiming we have "freedom of the press."
What, exactly, is the motivation for these police officers, these supposed upholders of the law, to so blatantly disobey the most significant document in our country? Do they not realize that their pensions were most likely tied up in a stock market that bottomed out because of this "1%" they are now supporting with their actions? Do they not acknowledge that they are a part of this majority being forced to shoulder the burden of debt that others have manufactured? They so easily strike down people my age, and people my parents' age, and people your age. For what? Because they were told to do so? Have they never read the transcripts of the Nuremberg Trials?
Now, I would never go so far as to equate police to Nazis. They are nowhere near the same. This aside, the justification of "being told to do so" has been used time and again as an excuse to commit any number of atrocities.
Of course, a person cannot simply be told to support a movement, even when confronted with any number of facts. No, people will only begin to agree with the Occupy movement when they have made an emotional connection to it.
My connection is simple enough to understand- I was raised by the public education system with the impression that if I worked hard and went to college, life would be set. Now that I'm a year and a half from graduation and thousands of dollars in the hole with student loans, however, prospects seem grim. I worked hard, I paid my damned taxes last year, and yet I'm being asked to not only pay an exorbitant amount of money for my education, but I am also facing the prospect of having social programs I rely on slashed, simply because the richest people in this country do not feel like paying taxes.
Where is the justice in that? More so, where is the democracy? We live in a country with the second-lowest socio-economic mobility of all developed nations on the planet. My being not-rich is not a fault of my own, except that I was born into the wrong family. Because, as much as Herman Cain might protest otherwise, the biggest determining factor in your wealth as an adult is the economic class of your parents. While there certainly are exceptions to this, exceptions do not set the standard.
No, I was raised with the idea that when you earned more money than most people, it was your responsibility to contribute that good fortune back into society. I worked in soup kitchens, I donate money, I volunteer. It is not driven by some moral standard; it is driven by the knowledge that a society heavily-reliant upon its people cannot be successful unless everyone contributes as much as possible. If these rich people are "job creators," where exactly are all the jobs? What have they pumped back into their community?
Being a country run by its own people, for its own people, is a serious responsibility. With the acceptance of being a member of this country, you acknowledge that we need people, of all kinds. If you are unwilling to contribute, get out of this country. When the society as a whole is healthy and provided for, it is more efficient. Jobs do not magically arise out of the ether; rather, they come from necessity. When more people spend money within the system, demand rises. The people most likely to spend a large sum of money in their community are not that mysterious one percent. A person who earns fifty thousand dollars is far more likely to spend almost all of that than a person who earns several million.
Why, then, are people who are statistically part of this "99%" willing to support the other one? Perhaps because the one percent has worked hard to create in the minds of Americans the idea that you, too, can become a part of their exclusive club, as long as you support them. Evidence, of course, would suggest otherwise.
I suppose that what we have here is a massive failure to communicate. The people who believe they can aspire to be rich have been fed these fallacies by the very group they wish to join. They have come to believe the 99% movement is one of "young, self-entitled people," which is entirely untrue (as the name suggests, 99% of the population consists of more than twenty-somethings). They have been told that it is unfair to expect these wealthy people to pay taxes, because they (the wealthy) create jobs that simply are not there.
It is an entire system built on misinformation, and the vast majority of people are tired of it. These backwards stalwarts can either find a legitimate argument against the movement, or they can join it, but those who sit comfortably behind snide commentary like, "McDonald's is hiring" or "I bet they don't even pay taxes" are only destined to make idiots of themselves. They do not have to go down to the camps and join the literal occupation, but they are welcome to contact their representatives, vote against policies maintaining the status quo, and use their money to support those companies and campaigns with which they find common ground. Being a part of this movement is not about being anti-capitalist; it is about making sure that corporations remember who really pays their wages. Capitalism, much like democracy, cannot survive if it alienates the people upon which it relies. Being a part of this movement means you feel the system in which you exist has forgotten you're there. Change is real, and it can happen- look at the mega-banks changing their policies in anticipation of losing customers to credit unions. This isn't about drum circles, or tents, this is about a movement so big, so significant, that it is not restrained by physical boundaries. They have occupied Wall Street, and Los Angeles, and Boise, but they're also occupying blogs, they're occupying news sources, they're occupying Twitter and they're occupying Facebook. They're in multiple countries, they speak multiple languages, they come from different backgrounds. You can choose to be one of them, or you can choose to be surrounded by them.
My name is Meg, and I am a part of the 99%.
No comments:
Post a Comment