I was watching a commentator on the news last night and he had a slant on this issue that really struck me. His position was than nobody in the USA is mad at people who are rich (seemed logical to me), that anyone who struck it rich was just living the same American dream we all have. What the "Occupy" movements are all about is being shut out of that very American dream by those who have achieved it.
At first I thought that was crap, but then I thought about the recent developments in our country, the widening schism between the "haves" and the "have nots", and the declining belief in our youth population that their lives will be "better" than the lives of their parents. I know that is what motivated me to go to college, I wanted more than my parents managed without a college education and in my case the two degrees I earned were the ticket (not so much the Bachelor's degree, but certainly the Master's degree). My daughter, on the other hand, appears to be stuck in poverty regardless of her motivations (which, IMHO, seem sincere but somewhat limited in intensity due to the "Party, Party, Party" lifestyle in which she and most of her friends engage).
We, the "greatest generation" did this to our kids....we convinced them that they didn't have to wait, didn't have to prevail in the face of difficulty or adversity, and didn't let them see us suffer when we had to, b/c we hid from them how hard we were working to give our kids all those benefits we never had as kids and young adults. As a result, they haven't ever known life without answering machines/cordless telephones/cell-phones, microwaves, fast food restaurants, DVD's and cable TV and the internet...they've never had to wait for dinner to be warmed up in the oven or on the stove top, never had to wait for a movie they wanted to see to make it to their local theater, etc. We convinced them that life was going to be easy, b/c we made theirs that way as much as we could, and now we have a younger generation that believes that they should start out on a new job making the same $$ we have worked for 40 years to achieve and that the job should be easy and that they should not have to endure the indignities of a demanding/demeaning supervisor or boss who has made their job miserable....there's this "I don't have to put up with no $h1+" attitude that rears up and bites them in the a$$ every time they turn around.
We're gonna pay for that....the decimation of the middle class will become the death knell for those very "fail-safe" programs we were forced to participate in, with promises that we would be taken care of in retirement, even if it were not a lavish lifestyle. The 99% who are feeling "disenfranchised" will not be able to bear the burden and the 1% WILL NOT bear the burden, nor do they even seem interested in sharing in it to the degree they can afford.
We've really gotten ourselves into a fine mess this time, haven't we:
Laurel & Hardy - Another Fine Mess - YouTube
That "crashing" sound you heard is the sound of our society, and, yes, our greed-encouraging capatilist system, self-destructing.
Even Laurel & Hardy knew that "United we stand, Divided we fall".....and we're certainly a divided society now!!
Cheers????
Doug