What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry

melancholic romantic comic cynic. bi & genderqueer. fantasy writer. sysrae on ao3.

99 vs 53 vs the military

So, maybe I’m missing something as a non-American outsider, but to me it seems as though the only real difference between the struggling people on the We Are The 99% tumblr and the struggling people on the retaliatory We Are The 53% tumblr is that, while both sides seem to think middle-and lower-class life in the USA is hard, unfair and difficult, the 53ers believe that things have to be that way, so there’s no point complaining or laying blame, whereas the 99ers want a better, fairer world.

And it seems to me that if the only real ideological difference between the proletarian agitators of a fledgling revolutionary movement and their slightly better-off equivalents in the middle class is that the latter think that the system is incapable of improving, then the 1% who sit above them should be very, very worried about what will happen when they realise that it actually is - or rather, that it should be.

Also: it seems to me that when a national crisis of debt and poverty is being driven almost entirely by people with unpaid college and medical bills, in a country which has no innate support systems for free education and healthcare but which fights a lot of wars in the interests of its richest members - wars that need soldiers, most of them young people recruited from the poorest levels of society on the promise of free college and medical insurance, two things that such people desperately need but which, coincidentally, they are unlikely to find outside the armed services - then consciously or not, protesters are actively rebelling against a system which is perfectly calibrated to ensure that large numbers of poor Americans continue to join the army. And that means that, on a fundamental level, any potential changes wrought by Occupy Wall Street don’t just threaten corporations: they threaten the military, too. 

  1. fozmeadows posted this