Hey, Occupy Wall Street and wherever else you're occupying. Can we talk?
Great. I want to start by bringing up two points:
1) You're completely right in that our nation is, to put it bluntly, completely dysfunctional. The inequalities in wealth exhibited in modern-day America is pretty much at odds with any sort of progressive thinking. The fact that there are people making millions of dollars off of those who can't afford to pay their rent is unconscionable. The amounts of money thrown around in DC is disgusting and entirely antithetical to the spirit in which this nation was founded - this country was meant to be run by everyone, not by those who can buy into industries which have millions to feed into the legislative machine.
2) You're completely wrong about a lot of stuff.
Fact: in the grand scheme of things, if you are posting something to the internet about how you are in the 99%, you are grossly misguided about the way the world works. Why?
Can you afford food? I don't mean good food, I don't mean lots of food, I mean 'something that will provide some calories and nutrients'? If yes, you are better off than about 925 million people in the world.
Can you afford shelter? Meaning, on a regular basis do you have access to a building in which there is an adequate place to sleep? If yes, you are better off than about a hundred million people in the world.
Did you go to elementary school? You had a better start than over a hundred million children today.
Can you read? I'm assuming you can, so you're better off than nearly 800 million adults around the world.
Are you afraid that you're going to die from an easily-preventable disease? I don't mean 'die of cancer because I can't afford chemotherapy', I mean, for example, 'die of cholera because there is no such thing as clean water here'. If not, then you're better off than the roughly five million people who will be effected by cholera alone every year.
If you are born in America, you are unbelievably lucky. As broken and corrupt as our system may be it is still a functional system that is light-years ahead of the vast majority of the world.
I'm not writing this off as White People's Problems, because 1) it's not and 2) one of the things that makes America great is that Americans will always, always fight to make things *better*. That, more than anything else, is the soul of our nation - we are never satisfied and always want things to improve. Yes, let's reform our financial industry. Let's march on Washington and camp on the Mall and shout and stomp and play guitar until Congress gets the message and stops listening to rich industry lobbyists and starts listening to us. Let's chain ourselves to the gate in front of the White House until President Obama orders Guantanamo to actually close. Hell, if I was still back in Santa Fe and un-/underemployed there's a chance I'd have joined the crowd in Albuquerque. Our country has problems; let's try to fix them.
But. To entirely lose perspective is disingenuous. To not have any perspective in the first place is worse, but probably more common.
If your problem is you can't afford your mortgage? In the grand scheme of things, that doesn't matter. You're still rich, globally speaking. Living on ramen noodles? Every five seconds a child dies from hunger. Today - just like they did yesterday, just like they will tomorrow - people are dying of diseases like malaria and cholera and measles, diseases which barely exist in America. Today, women live in countries where they are not allowed to speak or read or drive. Today, children are working in sweatshops. They work on farms and in mines, in unspeakable conditions.
Does it suck that the head of JPMorgan Chase makes millions while other American struggle to feed themselves and their families? Yes. And I've been there, in a situation where you're scraping by paycheck-to-paycheck, and your employer is trying to cut costs, and you feel sick when you need to call someone and ask if you can borrow some money, and you feel a little knot of shame in your belly whenever you're at the grocery store and need to tell the cashier it's an EBT, not debit card, because if it weren't for food stamps you couldn't afford groceries at all. It sucks. It's unfair. We need to change it.
But let's remember that the world is not fair, and perhaps one of the greatest privileges that we have as Americans - maybe even greater than having clean water and some semblance of social support networks - is that when push comes to shove we have a voice. We can take to the streets. People may get pepper sprayed or hit by the police or rounded up and arrested. They will not be shot in the head. The police will not see you protesting, then come into your home during the night and kill you and your family or worse. The Occupy Wall Street protesters will not disappear into a prison which on paper doesn't exist, to an ultimate fate unknown.
Things are bad in America, but they're bad *by our standards*. Let's try and remember that. Remember that while you protest banks, children die preventable deaths in nations where their parents *can't* speak out against the system. Just keep it in mind, that's all I ask.
