Read this first. It's an editorial by a friend of mine, single mother of three, graduate student in sociology with two degrees already under her belt. She discusses the silence of the media about the Wall Street protests.
She hits on something here that has been bothering me about the national conversation. It's the pseudo masochism involved in saying, "The world is a crappy, crappy place, and it is our lot to be pissed on by those with the power to piss on us, so shut your whining and drink the trickle down, which might not be gold, but at least it's golden." This idea that it cannot be any better, and that we are somehow wrong for wanting things to be better, that corporations and the rich somehow should have more rights than those of us who make less than $300K a year, that it is somehow morally objectionable to put yourself in the path of that juggernaut tells me that we are, in some ways, a beaten and broken people, a bullied people, a people in love with the idea of suffering. Whether this is part of our deep rooted Calvinist ethos, where free will is merely an illusion, or just the insidious indoctrination of corporatist big brother types is beyond my ken. It's probably an unholy mixture of both.