Why don't they just get a job?

This is a typical comment from most my conservative friends - and they do somewhat have a point.

Most everyone I've known more than 20 years have made their way in life through hard work, many by serving in the military as I did.  They worked McJobs, they were baristas.  So their point of view is that, if they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and made something of themselves, why can't all these OWSers?


Good question, but sort of missed the point in my estimation.  The world is full of individuals who've been successful despite the obstacles thrown in front of them.  Many haven't succeeded. Why should we knowingly create an economic and political system that favors the few to the detriment of the many?  I think this is the issue on the table here, not why can't a group of protestors get employed.  It's about the systemic destruction of opportunity for anyone but the already privileged, and whether that's the world We the People want to make ours, or if there is truly a better one out there.

When Citibank begins marketing financial products to the "Plutonomy" (clever taking a concept, changing the suffix and making it a trade-markable item) you know we're in trouble.  They don't even care about keeping the topic quite anymore.  (See this article on Plutonomy to get started on the details: Times Colonist)

What's really amazing to me is how the upper middle class (lets say the top 20%) have bought into this line of argument.  Coming from a world of relative privilege compared to the bottom 80%, yet a stone to the sun compared to the 1%, they've adopted the liturgy of the wealthy in some misguided belief that they too will get there.  They've been to the best schools (their parents' money can buy), networked into powerful business relationships, and are set to make their $250,000 or so a year, and somehow this has convinced them that they've succeeded on their own merits.  In reality, they've neither succeeded (A hedge fund manager can make $250,000 a day guys), nor competed on their own merits (they were favored from birth.)

If this group (which I'll agree I too belong to in comparison to the bottom 60% - I'd say I've moved from somewhere around the 60th percentile where my parents were to somewhere in the 3rd to 5th percentile today) can't see the disparity we've created in opportunity, and the wasted potential this represents for all of us Americans, then we're in trouble.  For as the Terror taught la France, so too shall OWS teach America - when the vast teeming masses that make up the bulk of this country see no future, no potential, no ability to improve their lives for themselves or their children, then things can and will get ugly.