It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering, for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.
--W. Somerset Maugham
One thing that the Occupy Movement has done magnificently is draw attention to the fact that the vast, vast majority of Americans have been ill-served by the top-oriented, trickle-down economic and political policies to which our country has pledged its allegiance for the past 30 years. And no group within OWS has done that more eloquently, more movingly, than We Are the 99%.
If you click on that link and go to their tumblr you’ll read testimonial after testimonial from average people who have been left scrambling to fend for themselves as a result of these policies. Testimonials from people who discovered when the final debt bubble burst that, in 21st century America, working hard and playing by the rules is no longer enough to ensure one’s survival. Forget about the aphorism that says “a society’s greatness is measured by how it treats the least of its members,” these people are coming to grips with the fact that America’s top-oriented, trickle-down approach often doesn’t set a place at the table for even average Americans.
I suppose that the apologists for the current system recognize how compelling these stories are because one of them, Erick son of Erick, recently started a competing tumblr: We Are the 53%. Its name derives from the fact that, in America, only 53 percent of the population earns even the minimum amount necessary to subject them to federal income taxes. So these people are what passes for the lucky ones in today’s America.
The site itself contains testimonials from people describing how hard they’ve personally had to work, sometimes describing how poor they still are, and yet how little sympathy they have for anybody with the temerity to point out that 21st century America is a grossly unfair place to live.
Many of these testimonials are truly maddening – not in a These people make me so angry I can’t see straight kind of a way, but in an I can’t understand why you are fighting to preserve a system that clearly doesn’t care about you kind of way.
More below the fold.
