Occupy My Heart

One of the ill-effects of being without a computer for so long is that you tend to fall out of the times when it comes to (inter)national news. I don't have cable, don't pay for magazine subscriptions, and the only papers I read are local papers when they happen to be nearby and I have a free five minutes. And even then I usually flip straight to the opinion section to read some of the most inept letters to the editor you will ever see. Crotchety old people or opinionated college students barking about this or that sensitive issue and causing a ruckus until something else grabs their attention. So when I first heard about this Occupy Wall Street nonsense I rolled my eyes. Fitting, I thought, that it only existed in the mainstream as a half-baked afterthought. Probably a couple hundred twentysomethings with some sort of twig up their ass, for a good cause or not. Then, the other day, it hit me: this is how those Tea Party cunts started out.

Truth be told I don't remember when the Tea Party first hit the scene. As odd a sight as it may be, protesters in powdered wigs with teabags and poorly written signs isn't exactly something you watch and think, "this is a critical moment in American history." And unless you're studying groupthink in the American people, it still isn't. I believe a large (maybe the) reason the Tea Party is still even quasi-relevant is because the monied powers-that-be have recognized their potential to divert public outrage away from those responsible--the powers themselves--towards some more convenient scapegoat, like that black guy. Let's be real here: the Tea Party, with little exception, is absolutely nowhere near smart, or even capable, enough to accomplish all that the Tea Party has without help from the kinds of people that would love to keep the American people riled up at Democrats and Big Government. I'd like to envision OWS as a more reality-grounded alternative to the Tea Party. I'm sure they believe in some pretty crazy shit too, but the basic message of "this shit ain't right" rings painfully true. Maybe this is the tip of the wake-the-fuck-up iceberg.

That's a pretty fucking big maybe though.

The American experience teaches you to be a cynical asshole. You'll always be poor, they'll always be rich, and good people who make too much noise are either co-opted or shot. Provided my rationale for the Tea Party's continued existence is true, OWS is a far more attractive target for our monied benefactors to crush, neutralize, or slowly force into irrelevancy. People, in the grandest sense of the term, don't think for themselves. They believe what's dictated as truth. It will be interesting to see what becomes of OWS if they keep the momentum up enough to actually make a splash. If they're still around in five months, I'll be very (pleasantly) surprised.

As an imminent college graduate, I have more of a stake than ever in the economic future of this country. I want to be able to find a job that isn't assembling sixty different kinds of hamburger with nobody telling me how to do any of it. If things continue the way they have been, my options will be that or being unemployed, living at home with my mother. Frankly I could have done that without ever accruing $22,000 in federal student loan debt. I went to college to become something, to get a comfortable job like my parents and pop culture promised me would happen. I've seen a number of my friends, highly intelligent people with excellent grades and even lucrative degrees, leave school only to plunge deep into unemployment or underemployment and debt. Contrary to the opinion of one house nigger, they are in fact quality people cheated by a bullshit system that promised them better since the cradle. Every day I fear that will be my future, too. Something's gotta give, and soon.