Posted on 10/20/2011 8:21:54 AM PDT by Kaslin
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 ongoing 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, gauged 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.
Spot on.
Interesting and appropriate question. I ask that question every time I go to Wal-Mart.
Excellent article. I’m really sick of these infantile people.
Awesome article! As the mom of twins, I am constantly trying to be “fair,” but no matter how hard I try, there are always times when one gets something that the other doesn’t. And that’s ok too, because that’s the way life works. I also have thought about the parents of some of these people, and wondered if they are proud or scratching their head asking how this happened?
More parents need to teach their kids the values that this country was founded upon - that it takes hard work to get ahead in life and that no one owes you anything.
They have free will, MaryBeth. You can teach them until you're old and gray and blue in the face, but some of them are still going to turn out to be idiots, especially in a culture that rewards certain types of idiocy with attention and respect. (See: President Barack Obama)
May all your children grow up to be respectable investment bankers.
Except for the Joe Biden's Nancy Pelosie's and Barak Obama's who are using you to help destroy the country you are enjoying these freedoms in. You are the ultimate 'useful idiots'.
Perfect analysis of the fleabaggers. A bunch of whiny spoiled brats and smoked-out hippies.
I have a nephew who ran up huge student loan debts (humanities: no good job to show for it) and of course is rooting for one the OWS “demands” — student loan forgiveness. My message to him, “great, let’s make it retroactive 35 years: you can start paying me back this minute.” I think that shut him up once and for all.
These confused and verminous protesters are easily spotted as toddlers, throwing screaming fits and hitting their mothers in the grocery store.
ROFL!!!!!
The author nails it.
The author left out
“don’t take expensive electronics with you to a crowd that has no respect for private property”
“if you’re a 19 yr old girl, don’t share a tent with a strange man who doesn’t respect personal/private property, or you’re likely to get a ‘bonus’”
Don't forget "saggers", i.e. pants below the waist.
When I was going to computer programming school in 1967, there were lots of "free spirits" in class. Not like the zoo inmates of today, but ragged shorts, beards, long hair - all the "in" stuff of the "out" crowd.
Graduation day came and we all had to interview for jobs. The transformation was astounding - beards shaved, hair cut, slacks, shirts and ties - in some cases 3-piece suits. All of us "straights" had a big laugh at how quickly Reality replaced Free Spirit.
Oh, yes ...
I just went to the on-line Apple Store and configured a completely maxed-out all the bells and whistles MacBook Pro. Price tag is $4800. So ... that bimbo that claims to have had her Mac stolen, and estimated its cost at $5500, is FOS.
From the title, I was wondering if the article was about the protesters who, during the course of their (*ahem*) activities in the park, become parents.
Come on! Give the poor little girl a break, After all, she has no idea how much her daddy paid for it, it was a groovy color.
You forget to include software.
Still, that price is absolute maximum for hardware.
$1100 for a 512MB solid state "hard drive"???
Really?
I doubt that Miss OWS had that ... in fact, I doubt she had a MacBook Pro.
I was trying to establish an absolute maximum price for an Apple branded laptop computer.
How much do you think I should add for software?
LOL. That little fact will still be ignored by the OWS protesters.
“Real people with real dollars are underwriting your civic temper tantrum”
LOVE IT!
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