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October 17 2011

I saw this on my fbook feed. I was a little shocked, honestly. This is why I disagree: I am not dissimilar to the person who put up that missive: went to a state school, didn’t take out loans, lived on my own and worked 2/3 jobs to pay for living and tuition, graduated with honors, went to grad school, got into teaching, went to get my credential. I am pretty well “set” as things go, and proud of how I got there, but even without the sob story the numbers still place me in the 99%. To chalk this movement up to the American need for shiny objects or instant gratification is to be willfully blind to the larger infrastructure which has both driven consumption while intentionally alienating them from the means to obtain it. When a sustainable quality of life began to be outside the reach of Americans, we were told to work harder, get an education (generally going into debt to do so); when that began to fail, we were told to work harder, and borrow against long-term investments (homes), or take out credit, to survive the rough patches; when that began to fail we were told to invest, while banks deregulated and treated finances like a round of craps; when that failed THEM, we bailed them out; when we began losing our jobs, and our homes, we became the bad guys. Meanwhile, those bankers who happily accepted our bailout money are turning profits for a seventh quarter in a row, issuing new fees to us, happily funneling bonuses into their pockets lined with human sweat and blood and despair. All while pushing the agenda that the only way out of this is to consume more, and vote someone into office that will allow them to continue to earn more money than most four-person families do in a lifetime. There is a point where the people have to stop and realize they’ve been had, are being had, and will continue to be had unless they speak up. For whatever tiny effect that is having right now.  Of course, I am looking at this from the perspective of someone who looks into one hundred faces every day, one hundred faces that are graduating and going to try and join the work force, or try and go to college. Either case has effectively been cut off from the “American Dream” before they ever started. I look back on the hundreds of faces I taught before, many of whom can’t find a job  selling lotion at Bed, Bath & Beyond, and go to school thinking that will give them that in to not live life like their disadvantaged parents did, so they can move out of the apartments where guns spark twice a night, and where they share a room with several siblings, because dad lost his job shuffling produce at the supermarket. What kind of ‘dream’ are we providing for people, and the children, when the majority of wealth is filed into the pockets of the ludicrously rich, who continue to accumulate it with the miserly desperate grasp of Scrooge, unsatisfied unless they reign as financial kings of this tortured and crumbling nation? The original writer of that screed had one thing right: this IS a story about irresponsibility. About the wanton and cruel irresponsibility of the financial overlords who hoard while the teeming masses cry, and starve, and die. There is no justice in this imbalance, and the disparity has been growing steadily year by year, month by month, to the point that Reagan now looks like a moderate. Mocking the disenfranchised serves no purpose but to keep the kings of greed in power. If we fancy ourselves a first world nation, such archaic notions should not be humored, excused, or propagated.

I saw this on my fbook feed. I was a little shocked, honestly. This is why I disagree:

I am not dissimilar to the person who put up that missive: went to a state school, didn’t take out loans, lived on my own and worked 2/3 jobs to pay for living and tuition, graduated with honors, went to grad school, got into teaching, went to get my credential. I am pretty well “set” as things go, and proud of how I got there, but even without the sob story the numbers still place me in the 99%.

To chalk this movement up to the American need for shiny objects or instant gratification is to be willfully blind to the larger infrastructure which has both driven consumption while intentionally alienating them from the means to obtain it. When a sustainable quality of life began to be outside the reach of Americans, we were told to work harder, get an education (generally going into debt to do so); when that began to fail, we were told to work harder, and borrow against long-term investments (homes), or take out credit, to survive the rough patches; when that began to fail we were told to invest, while banks deregulated and treated finances like a round of craps; when that failed THEM, we bailed them out; when we began losing our jobs, and our homes, we became the bad guys. Meanwhile, those bankers who happily accepted our bailout money are turning profits for a seventh quarter in a row, issuing new fees to us, happily funneling bonuses into their pockets lined with human sweat and blood and despair. All while pushing the agenda that the only way out of this is to consume more, and vote someone into office that will allow them to continue to earn more money than most four-person families do in a lifetime. There is a point where the people have to stop and realize they’ve been had, are being had, and will continue to be had unless they speak up. For whatever tiny effect that is having right now.

 Of course, I am looking at this from the perspective of someone who looks into one hundred faces every day, one hundred faces that are graduating and going to try and join the work force, or try and go to college. Either case has effectively been cut off from the “American Dream” before they ever started. I look back on the hundreds of faces I taught before, many of whom can’t find a job  selling lotion at Bed, Bath & Beyond, and go to school thinking that will give them that in to not live life like their disadvantaged parents did, so they can move out of the apartments where guns spark twice a night, and where they share a room with several siblings, because dad lost his job shuffling produce at the supermarket.

What kind of ‘dream’ are we providing for people, and the children, when the majority of wealth is filed into the pockets of the ludicrously rich, who continue to accumulate it with the miserly desperate grasp of Scrooge, unsatisfied unless they reign as financial kings of this tortured and crumbling nation?

 The original writer of that screed had one thing right: this IS a story about irresponsibility. About the wanton and cruel irresponsibility of the financial overlords who hoard while the teeming masses cry, and starve, and die. There is no justice in this imbalance, and the disparity has been growing steadily year by year, month by month, to the point that Reagan now looks like a moderate. Mocking the disenfranchised serves no purpose but to keep the kings of greed in power. If we fancy ourselves a first world nation, such archaic notions should not be humored, excused, or propagated.