You guys should have watched Michael Moore tonight on The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC to get a better idea of who makes up the occupy movements across the country. They are everywhere from large cities to smaller towns. Michael himself has been to several sites. He was in Denver tonight.
Had you listened, you would have heard Michael explain if someone is inciting violence, to assume they are not part of the movement.
But you would have also learned that the movement now encompases people of all ages and backgrounds.
Families are bringing their children.
Folks who are simply tired of the injustice in the world. Tired of the corporate stranglehold around their necks.
They are people who only want a job.
People who only want to be able to have a roof over their head and over their family’s heads. Not having to live in fear that they will not.
To be able to afford to see a dr and seek care when they are sick.
Sound familiar? I know I read about these same things in the latter verses of the Gospel of St Matthew Chap 25.
God bless you all and peace.
Someone sent me an email describing the Occupy Wall Street group. There wasn’t a link, so here is the whole essay:
Call it an occupational hazard, but I can’t look at the Occupy Wall Street protesters without thinking, “Who parented these people?”
As a culture columnist, I’ve commented on the social and political ramifications of the “movement” - now known as “OWS” - whose fairyland agenda can be summarized by one of their placards: “Everything for everybody.”
Thanks to their pipe-dream platform, it’s clear there are people with serious designs on “transformational” change in America who are using the protesters like bedsprings in a brothel. Yet it’s not my role as a commentator that prompts my parenting question, but rather the fact that I’m the mother of four teens and young adults. There are some crucial life lessons that the protesters’ moms clearly have not passed along. Here, then, are five things the OWS protesters’ mothers should have taught their children but obviously didn’t, so I will:
- Life isn’t fair. The concept of justice - that everyone should be treated fairly - is a worthy and worthwhile moral imperative on which our nation was founded. But justice and economic equality are not the same. Or, as Mick Jagger said, “You can?t always get what you want.” No matter how you try to “level the playing field,” some people have better luck, skills, talents or connections that land them in better places. Some seem to have all the advantages in life but squander them, others play the modest hand they’re dealt and make up the difference in hard work and perseverance, and some find jobs on Wall Street and eventually buy houses in the Hamptons. Is it fair? Stupid question.
- Nothing is “free”. Protesting with signs that seek “free” college degrees and “free” health care make you look like idiots, because colleges and hospitals don’t operate on rainbows and sunshine. There is no magic money machine to tap for your meandering educational careers and “slow paths” to adulthood, and the 53 percent of taxpaying Americans owe you neither a degree nor an annual physical. While I’m pointing out this obvious fact, here are a few other things that are not free: overtime for police officers and municipal workers, trash hauling, repairs to fixtures and property, condoms, Band-Aids and the food that inexplicably appears on the tables in your makeshift protest kitchens. Real people with real dollars are underwriting your civic temper tantrum.
- Your word is your bond. When you demonstrate to eliminate student loan debt, you are advocating precisely the lack of integrity you decry in others. Loans are made based on solemn promises to repay them. No one forces you to borrow money; you are free to choose educational pursuits that don’t require loans, or to seek technical or vocational training that allows you to support yourself and your on-going educational goals. Also, for the record, being a college student is not a state of victimization. It’s a privilege that billions of young people around the globe would die for - literally.
- A protest is not a party. On Saturday in New York, while making a mad dash from my cab to the door of my hotel to avoid you, I saw what isn’t evident in the newsreel footage of your demonstrations: Most of you are doing this only for attention and fun. Serious people in a sober pursuit of social and political change don’t dance jigs down Sixth Avenue like attendees of a Renaissance festival. You look foolish, you smell gross, you are clearly high and you don’t seem to realize that all around you are people who deem you irrelevant.
- There are reasons you haven’t found jobs. The truth? Your tattooed necks, gouged ears, facial piercings and dirty dreadlocks are off-putting. Nonconformity for the sake of nonconformity isn’t a virtue. Occupy reality: Only 4 percent of college graduates are out of work. If you are among that 4 percent, find a mirror and face the problem. It’s not them. It’s you.
Marybeth Hicks is the author of “Don’t Let the Kids Drink the Kool-Aid: Confronting the Left’s Assault on Our Families, Faith and Freedom.” Find her on the Web at
www.marybethhicks.com. Copyright 2011 The Washington Times, LLC.
Funny. woooooo. I just sponsored my nephew in confirmation tonight, so I am going to keep my comments charitable.
I attended a Confirmation Mass earlier this yr at a parish where I’ve attended Mass. Congrats to your nephew on his Confirmation.
