To: Rich Kahn
From:
Sent Wed 11/16/2011 3:40:52 PM
Subject Fwd: Occupy Reality
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You will love this!
Begin forwarded message:
From: Ike Groff
Date: November 14, 2011 3 41 22 PM EST
Subject: Occupy Reality
Marybeth Hicks
Columnist The Washington Times
Oct 20, 2011
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 arc 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
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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 arc 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.
Ed.'s Note: And their mothers likely directed them to a college that doesn't teach or
understand Capitalism. The ones that do teach it are few and far between.
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