Last Friday I sat in my office aiming to finish up a few tiny projects so I could prepare for a long 4 hour drive home. I’m in the process of relocating from Roanoke to the nation’s capital because the economy in the general area has fallen apart. A college degree is not a guarantee that you will get paid even the median salary for your profession or experience level, but it does guarantee a small mortgage of your soul and an interest rate high enough to ensure that the next 10 years of your life you’ll be living in a cheap apartment, despite making a solid middle class wage – even if it is on the lower side of middle class. None the less, the market may have crashed and the corporate world may be skimping on wages, but not in DC which somehow managed to be completely un-phased by the crisis that most of us paid dearly for in 2008.
The only way one could dodge such a crisis was to be in the fortunate position to have nothing to begin with, which thankfully was a position I had a firm foothold on during the collapse. Needless to say you can’t lose much if you’re already scraping the bottom of the barrel. I guess if I could have gone any lower; there were plenty of foreclosures and not enough people buying, so I could have claimed squatting rights on a really nice place – at least until the market had bounced back – a day that’s still yet to come.
It was somewhere around 1PM when one of my colleagues knocked on my door, a short squat guy with African American qualities – most likely mixed. He’s a geek, much like me, which is a fortunate quality to have if you can manage to survive the entitlement program that most people call high school. He invites me to lunch with a few of the other guys at the office, a taller overweight gentleman who recently went to work in our accounting department, and another gentleman from Texas who simply referred to me by my stage name Dave Grohl.
I don’t really know anyone where I am at yet, but the paychecks aren’t bad, so I figure I’ll stick with it a bit. If nothing else as another person traveling on this planet a few friends might be a good thing to have since I am firm in that decision. Despite my deadline, I indulge and we go to this burger joint not far from the office.
The running joke around the area is that you’d be able to tell if the market ever did affect the DC area, because traffic would improve. A five mile drive can take an hour in this town during the peak of rush hour, but thankfully during lunch rush you can count on a conservative 30 minutes. My father lived in this area once and had called it the pulse of America. Based on the traffic conditions most days, if the roads were arteries, this place would be risking a triple bi-pass surgery and struggling on life support waiting for a transplant.
Conversations often turn political around me. My fiancée tells me often, that if there is one thing I am bad at its small talk, an allegation that I stand guilty as charged. Proof of this is the lack of dialog from the other side of the table, where I find myself dominating a conversation about the undue tax burden that state execution causes. Just a fun fact: California pays $300 million a year to house less than 15 death row in mates, which is at least 15 times what the rest of the prison system costs in that state for all other inmates. I thought I had a valid point.
The ride back warmed a little, with more expression of personal politics as the Texan revealed himself to be a Libertarian and I was outted as a Liberal. One comment from the back seat went a little something like, “You sound like someone that should be in downtown D.C. protesting,” to which I jokingly replied,” I don’t believe in Communism,” a reference to a statement my father had made about the Occupy movement the night before.
Earlier in the year, probably drunk on a warm summer night, I engaged in a heated discussion on someone’s Facebook page after I saw a remarkably shortsighted post on President Obama and his inability to produce any plans that would help repair the economy, without running the deficit up even higher. The conversation was mostly dominated by Tea Party activists, a movement of which I have never been a fan. I posted a few views, of which earned scorn and derision, not uncommon when you’re a liberal with friends that align more with conservative, often paranoid points of view.
Naturally (if you know me at all anyways), this conversation turned to me light heartedly poking fun at Tea Partiers, by calling them Tea Baggers, which rumor has it is a name that the Tea Partiers started using to define them, obviously without consulting their 14 year old sons before assimilating under such a banner. Is it true? Maybe, but a good laugh is a good laugh and I can dish what I take. It’s probably asking too much that others do the same.
Many of my arguments were based on political figures that aligned themselves with Tea Party values, or supposed values, and perhaps some of the guys I was talking with are correct in saying that the media had a hand in connecting political figures ideals to the movement itself; however, I do contend that what the public sees the public tends to believe. When a face such as Michele Bachmann is synonymous with the Tea Party (especially given her track record of misrepresenting facts and dodging questions) I can see how some stomachs may have turned.
I remember suggesting the idea that a new movement of concerned citizens should be formed, one that is devoid of central leadership with no specific agenda. Later that night I watched a special comment by Keith Olbermann which mirrored that sentiment, and little did I know a great deal of American’s were planning on this exact idea albeit based on a suggestion coming from a source in Canada.
When I learned of the Occupy movement, I was astonished to find these principles existed, with people marching full steam ahead and was even more shocked when the movement grew, decentralized, with a single method of communication bringing people together to represent similar ideals. The Internet is a wonderful tool and if nothing else I can say I’m proud to see people using it to its greatest potential – a medium of organization.
What does Occupy represent in my eyes? Simply, a group of concerned citizens who are tired of partisan politics, who are tired of good plans being ruined by pandering or the constant filibustering by Republicans, people who are sick of corporate greed, people who are even more tired of corporations posing as citizens while not being held accountable for their crimes in the same way any of us would be. A diversity of idea’s, a diversity of political affiliations, a diversity of religious ideals, but united by one idea; the system has failed.
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