There’s nothing radical about going to work every day.
Of course, that presupposes that you have a job to go to. An increasing number of us do not. For me, that’s the whole point of the Occupy Wall Street Movement.
People are not radical – especially as we get older and take on more responsibilities. That’s just the way it is. It’s hard to imagine carrying a sign, chanting slogans, and risking arrest when we are busily running as fast as we can to keep that hamster wheel spinning.
JP Morgan Chase doesn’t care if the social fabric of the country is disintegrating; your mortgage payment is due on the 1ST. Your boss expects you to keep your focus on the bottom line. Your children need things that you must provide.
Who has time to protest?
We are overworked, overwhelmed, and scared to death of falling off the wheel.
We leave the risk-taking to the young. They have nothing better to do, right?
It’s okay to admit it. Most of us are not cut out to be heroes. It’s easier to turn a blind eye to the suffering of the few while we try to make our own way. Unemployment is just a number to those who are employed – it holds no more importance than a batting average or a Neilson rating. We hear the number, we shrug, and we move on.
But to the unemployed, it means everything. When millions are looking for work that isn’t there, the future looks bleak.
For years, there has been a whittling away of the social safety net. It’s a net whose first strings were strung when the country was at its fiscal worst. We learned what can happen when the economy goes to Hell, so we took steps to avoid a repeat in the future.
Good idea.
Then it happened. The rich began to feel that they weren’t rich enough. They used their wealth to game the system. Too many politicians have a price, and Wall Street was able to meet it. How else can one explain the repeal of laws that were enacted to keep the greed of bankers in check? It’s commonly believed that banks took too many risks which led us into a recession. Bullshit.
There was no risk involved in what they did – at least not to them. They were golden from the start. It was an ingenious plan:
- Lie, cheat, and steal from investors as you package bogus mortgages and sell them as if they were bonds.
- Get the ratings agencies to bless your offerings with AAA ratings and collude with insurance companies to cover your butt when the crap hit the fan.
- Call in your markers with all of those politicians that you “carry in their pockets like so many nickels and dimes,” by lobbying for and getting huge bailouts. (Apologies to The Godfather.)
- Gouge consumers, toss them from their homes by the millions, hoard cash, and continue to devise new schemes for ripping people off.
Do we really need more reasons to be angry before we actually do something about it?
I’m not headed to downtown Manhattan today. I’m not proud of that, but there are other things that we can do to support the activists and it begins by paying attention.
There are no excuses for being uninformed. Even the media is slowly recognizing the movement. There’s something happening here. You don’t have to go to Liberty Square yourself, but you can Tweet it, blog it, or spread the word with some good old-fashioned talking.
My thoughts are with the activists and my check is in the mail.
They are fighting the good fight. If they are successful, society will benefit. If they are bullied into submission, or starved out from lack of support, each of us who chooses to stay on the sidelines will own a part of the blame.
Author Bio:
Ray Colon has written 158 posts on Ray's Blog.
He works with numbers for a living, but don't judge - boring accountants need love too. His blog has no niche (unless writing about things that are important to him is a niche). Some folks cringe when he gets “all political” on them, but he does it anyway when he's in that kind of mood. Sometimes, he writes something nice about someone, but you shouldn't get used to that. His first book, the one he hasn't written yet, is not available on Amazon. Subscribe to Ray's Blog via RSS or Email.
It's true that many have... } – 
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Twitter: heidi_caswell
October 12, 2011 at 8:11 am
Blame the banks, not Wall Street. Yes there are connections, and it comes down to who those who control the money control the government and most everything in our society. They like us being in debt. And yes, I’d put insurance companies in that golden too big to fail group. There is a reason for our huge cost of medical care. Surprisingly the cost of education has grown faster than medical costs. Food will follow only this will be a true shortage. Have you ever seen the cost of food go down? Much of this is masked by subsidizing the large corporate farms, smaller sized packages, more filler. What if we each had a small garden in our backyard, or bought from local csa’s.
Another thing we can do is to quit using our credit cards, large banks. Use small local banks, better yet credit unions. Pay off debt as quickly as possible. Support more small local businesses. The fruit stand on the corner. Local artisans. Any small business over large corporation.
We vote with our pocketbooks. Don’t want jobs outsourced while continuing to buy from the companies which outsource. Unemployment is worse than the picture our government tries to picture. Unemployment sucks. Yet at one time in our country many were self-employed. Can’t be laid off. Instead of taking out thousands in student loans they had apprenticeship programs. What if people bartered with each other goods and services. Consider that these banks, etc. want us dependent on our government, debt, where we give up our freedoms.
Protesting is one thing. Changing what we do to no longer feed the machine is even better. Get off that hamster wheel! Quit being dependent on those controlling the strings.
Very nice piece, Ray – and I love Heidi’s points too!