I love comedy. I like laughing, chuckling, etc. I love jokes in good taste, bad taste, off color, politically incorrect, whatever. If it's funny, I may enjoy it.
One of my favorite non-political websites is Cracked.com. If you're not familiar with it, there's a lot of humorous and fascinating articles written...sometimes about science, sometimes about food or nature, a lot of them about us weird old human beings and how we're just assholes to each other. Also, Photoshop contests. Fun for all, right?
Well, today, I read an article entitled 6 Things Rich People Need to Stop Saying.
To call it a "Pro 99%" message would be to simplify what was written. I encourage you to read the entire article, because it is well written (probably NSFW if your superiors don't like 'colorful' language)
"Well, $500,000 a Year Might Sound Like a Lot, but I'm Hardly Rich."
Hell, you've probably heard it in real life, from a boss or some guy sitting nearby at Starbucks. "I guess I'm considered rich now! Well, if I'm so 'rich,' why am I broke at the end of the month?!?" Uh, I think it's because your mortgage is $3,000 a month, since you live in a fucking palace. And because you took your family on that Disney cruise last summer. And because you pay for your kids' college, so that, unlike us, they won't be crushed under six figures of student loan debt at age 22. And because you eat all the best foods and drink the finest liquids.
....
For people who are grinding through overtime just to keep up with their bank's late fees, this induces an urge to storm a gated community with pitchforks and torches and make those people go spend a year in a trailer park or in a city apartment so small that when you flush the toilet, little droplets of piss splatter onto the bed.
We're not mad that a rich guy can spend a month on a mortgage what even two lowly wage earners struggle to see in the same period. No, we're mad because that guy is a voracious asshole who has the nerve to claim that my meager unemployment check is a cancer on society, and his low tax rate must be protected otherwise every single job will just dry up. We're mad because blowhards who make a ton of money and then immediately consider everyone below him to be nothing but
drains on society. Nevermind that society is about, you know, living. Not living large, just living in general. Yeah, some of us can barely do that. Thanks for caring.
"The only reason I have a hundred times more money than you is because I work a hundred times as hard!"
...it implies that money earned is a perfect indicator of a person's value to society -- if you're broke, it must mean you're a loser who contributes nothing to anyone's life. And that's downright bizarre when it comes from the same people who also go on and on about the importance of parenting and family values. Surely they've noticed that being a great stay-at-home parent makes you exactly zero dollars a year.
And volunteering to work at a shelter for battered women? Doesn't pay shit! Diving into a creek to save a toddler from drowning? It pays infinitely less than throwing a touchdown pass during the Super Bowl.
If everyone were really, truly rewarded for their talents and/or their contributions to society, the "starving artist" would be a long debunked myth, the broke musician would be a punchline, and anyone who volunteered, or parented, or taught their asses off would all be well compensated and revered.
Instead, the artists are called hippies and told to "get a job!". McDonald's is always hiring, right? Except when McDonald's received over one million applications for a hiring event that only netted 62,000 jobs nationwide. Do a Google search for "Walkergate" to see how public employees have been shat on, repeatedly, by the hyperconservatives who label teachers as "Union Thugs" instead of "Oh that's my kids teacher". Educators here in Virginia held a "Day of Mourning" thanks to the draconian budget cuts being foisted upon already funds-challenged school districts.
"Stop Asking for Handouts! I Never Got Help from Anybody!"
I think your parents poured untold resources into your hungry mouth. I think you had a roof over your head that was paid for by other people, I think you went to schools that were built and staffed and paid for by other people, I think you felt safe because the streets were patrolled by other people, I think you drove to your three jobs on roads paved by other people, in a car built by other people and burning oil that was drilled by other people in a nation whose borders were defended by other people.
...
Let's say some mean, even richer guy, like a wealthy gangsta rapper, hired a bunch of armed thugs to come take your farm. What would you do? Your shotgun won't fend them off -- they have a hundred bigger shotguns. What will you do, call the cops? That is, other people, who will risk their lives while being paid with still other people's tax money, who will try these bad guys in a court funded by yet other people's tax money, under laws passed by legislators paid with other people's tax money? Whoa, slow down there, welfare queen!
The ultra rich like to think that they and they alone are responsible for massive wealth. They like to pretend (or are so deluded) as to think that they never,
ever, at any point in their lifetime, ever got anything resembling "assistance" from anyone.
"Assistance" is getting a food stamp card, a "welfare" check, or Medicaid.
Things like public roads, public safety officials/law enforcement, and legislators who actually make the laws that have kept the country from literally becoming some sort of Wild-West-Meets-Mad-Max wasteland where everyone kills everyone because they can and because they want what the other guy has.
The only people who are truly carcinogenic are the people who get the scraps, the leftovers, the most meager of government assistance to try and put food on the table, if they're lucky. Not the vulture capitalists who put "hard working Americans" out of work while they reap the rewards. Not the silver-spoon crowd who were lucky enough to have been born into wealth and can only think that a time in a French chateau could be considered "poverty".
Get it through your thick skulls. We're not mad you're rich. We're mad because you mock us with champagne, tell us to be happy with shitty jobs, tell us to get off "welfare" when we lose our job (thanks to you), and then have the unnerving gall to proclaim that hundreds of thousands of dollars a year is "not really a lot of money"?
Even a website built mostly around things like "dick jokes" and articles on "How not to be a complete asshole, and how to get revenge on those who are!" gets it.
The sooner the rest of society does, maybe we'll have a chance at a real, full, recovery. For everyone. For the 99%.
Occupy. Everywhere.