To Occupy Wall Street: You ARE the 1%!

When these spoiled brats decided to “occupy Wall Street” in protest of evil corporations and evil banks who are keeping down the poor “99%” of the United State’s population while making sure that the greedy “1%” have all of the wealth, I had to laugh.  Why?  Because these kids just don’t get it.  For them, the system MUST be changed to one where there is “fairness” and where those who have achieved MUST give it to those who have done nothing to earn it, all in the name of fairness.

Guess what people?  Life is NOT fair!  Not everyone gets to be President.  Not everyone gets to be a high-paid athlete.  Not everyone gets to be a sex symbol.  Not everyone wins the Lottery.  All will NOT be saved!  A heavy smoker, sedentary person might live to be 100 while a health nut who does all the right things might die at 25.  Not everyone will get their dream job.  Everyone won’t get to marry their first love or even have their first love return that love.  Life, by its very nature, is unfair.  I think Herbert Spencer called it, “survival of the fittest.”

You know what makes America special?  Thanks to our Founding Fathers, who understood that Government will always attempt to take freedom from the people, our country is one where you have the OPPORTUNITY to be what you want to be, at least for the moment.  There are countless people who’ve seized that opportunity and made something of themselves.  I know several people, who thanks to their own hard work and spending their free time learning new things, were able to leave crappy jobs and move onto higher paying and more fulfilling jobs at other companies/corporations.   I know of a man, who came from a poor, black family, who worked his tail off and is now a very successful businessman and more.  He’d be in the so-called “1%” that the Occupy Wall Street crowd hates even though he earned his place there.

So, we have these spoiled brats, exercising their First Amendment rights to protest about how there are no jobs.  Well, jobs ARE very tough to come by for sure, but how are you able to afford protesting for weeks on end without a job?  Are you willing to do crappy jobs until you can get something better, or do you expect someone to just give it all to you now just because you borrowed $25,000 on some worthless degree and can’t find work that pays you $250,000 to start?

I hear cries of how banks are screwing them thanks to those massive student loans.  You know, when one buys a house or a car and takes a loan for them, is it the bank’s fault that you spent more money than you should on that house or car?  And since the cost of an education continues to rise, how come there’s no anger at the school’s about how they are gouging their customers (you students)?  I guess because those who run most colleges and universities have “good intentions” and “care” about people, they are exempt from the criticism that corporations would get for doing the exact same thing.

One of the things apparently not taught in school (besides accurate US and world history) is irony.  I have this vision of one of these Occupy Wall Street protestors being asked what “irony” is, and getting a response like, “It’s like goldy or bronzy, only it’s made of iron.” While that was a humorous line when Baldrick said it in Blackadder II, it isn’t funny in reality.

The irony that these Occupy Whatever fools fail to grasp is that while they protest against Capitalism, they enjoy the fruits of Capitalism.  While they decry evil corporations, they use the products of those evil corporations.  While they decry banks, they are quick to use them to get these overpriced educations.  They rail against the system, although our system is the dream of people world-wide and the reason so many people want to come to the United States.  After all, being poor in the U.S. is being RICH in many other countries in the world.

For example, if you go to a poor slum in some other country, how many of their poor people have TV’s?  A/C?  Microwaves?  DVD players?  Reliable electricity?  Running water?  On average (and not to discount the truly needy people in the US), most people classified as “poor” in the US have these things, yours truly included when I was officially in the “poor” category a few times in my life.  Indeed, I shudder thinking about those days of desperately trying to make ends meet, yet I always had electricity, I ran the A/C during the summer (I just didn’t run much of anything else) and kept the house COLD during that winter.  I always had food to eat and even sodas to drink.  I had a fridge to store food products in and a 4-eyed stove, with oven, to cook them with.  I even had a small TV, a large boom box, a nice collection of audio tapes (this is the 80’s we are talking about), and somehow, still found money to waste on comic books.  *_*

So, though I was officially poor by American standards, compared to poor people in other parts of the world, I was part of the rich, 1% who have so much and clearly stole it somehow from those other poor people in the world.

To the protestors, have you considered that despite your whining, you ARE the 1% as the world sees you? 

Do you know why jobs continue to be outsourced overseas even though there have been many, powerful, people who talk a good game decrying these activities?  You see, there are those who truly believe that America needs to be brought down to size and that America is too rich, even America’s poor. They see America as the world’s 1% and want to see social justice for the rest of the world.  What better way to redistribute the wealth of the United States than through outsourcing jobs?  Those who want this redistribution can then say, “These EVIL corporations are outsourcing jobs and it isn’t right!” while at the same time, they privately applaud it.  After all, it isn’t fair that American IT workers were making so much money and that these oh so smart people in India have nothing (as an example). 

As such, many companies send a great deal of IT work to India.  The corporation cuts their costs, then makes political “thank you” contributions to BOTH parties.  India gets a wealth injection, because even though they are paid pennies on the dollar of what an American worker would make, to those in India, it is a massive quality of life improvement.  Thus, as some might say, we have started to “given them the wealth” that was somehow stolen from them by all of us evil Americans, Occupy Wall Street crowd included.

Meanwhile, back in the US, the blame is placed squarely on the corporation’s shoulders and that evil political party who doesn’t care about poor people.  Union leaders strive to get the “workers of the world” to unite and thus put more money into their coffers, some of which is to be transferred to politicians who claim to care for the working man.  It is a nice, tidy package here, and why nothing changes.  The government and corporations work together in what has become known as “crony capitalism” — the corporations and companies get what they need and the politicians in charge of the government get to attack the corporations while getting political contributions form them, all in the name of staying in power.  Should one of these corporations fail, well, the politicians are there to make sure the government bails them out (but only for the sake of the plebs workers, you understand).

Our Founders had it right when they put the Bill of Rights into the Constitution of the United States to block the Federal Government from doing things to the citizens.  That is how our nation went from a being a colony to the most powerful and richest nation in the world in such a short period of time. Sadly, the desire to rule and to have the power to control people’s lives is so strong that both Republicans and Democrats have done much to overcome these limitations.  I fear this will result in us becoming slaves to the State as well as our nation dropping from its lofty heights. 

However, if you think our dropping will help the rest of the world, you are in for a big surprise.  It will just mean that everyone is equally miserable except for the ruling elite, who will live in comfort and luxury while finding new ways of shifting the blame for the economic misery of the people onto anything but the ruling elite themselves.  I for one, do not want such “fairness” imposed upon me.

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