Occupy Nothing

I’ve been meaning to write about the Occupy protests for awhile now, but I was busy being unemployed. You’d think that would make me a perfect candidate to embrace the 99% and bang my outrage into my keyboard and onto the web as soon as possible, but it didn’t. Probably because being unemployed has its side effects. Like making the dollar store my exclusive shopping destination. Or having to shut off my Internet access for six months because I couldn’t afford it.

Now that I’m working again and the World Wide Web is streaming the collective intelligence of the entire human race and funny cat pictures directly into my living room once more, I figured it was finally time for me to get around to sharing my thoughts on the current state of inequity in America.

Only I don’t feel like it. Mostly because I just don’t care. In a voiceover for a computer game you probably never played until they made its third sequel and added Optimus Prime and Qui-Gon Jinn to the cast, Ron Pearlman once said, “War. War never changes.”

And that’s pretty much how I feel about everything these days.

Inequity never changes. Politics never change. Candidates never change. Maybe it’s just the general sort of complacency that comes from being part of Generation X, twenty years after we perfected apathy and packaged it on the sides of lunch boxes and the covers of Tiger Beat, but I just don’t see the point of being outraged by something that will always stay the same.

Or maybe it’s because I have better things to worry about.

It’s not that I don’t care about what’s happening to the 99% or anything. I’m in the 99%. I think. I might be in the 87.4%, but I’m still waiting on a confirmation letter from the Who Gives A Shit Department. I’ve railed at length against the 1% and the 10% and every other percent that’s ever looked at me funny, but while I still loathe them, I can’t get on board with what the 99% is doing.

Why? There are a couple of reasons actually, not the least of which is that everything they’re doing is ineffective and nothing they’re doing is actually going to change anything. It’s an impotent movement that has no hope of affecting actual change because, like the Tea Party on the other side of the sanity coin, it’s fighting symptoms instead of causes.

It’s fine to hate ‘evil’ corporations, but unless you stop giving them your money, they’re never going to care. You can protest all you want and yell at every corporate exec and police officer who comes between you and your half caff venti soy vanilla latte until the cows come home, but greed? Greed never changes.

Corporations are only doing what corporations do. It’s like being mad at a dingo for stealing your baby because it’s evil rather than simply an animal doing what animals do when you leave your infant unattended in the Australian outback. If you want change, call a dog catcher. Or make the government keep the corporations in check. Teddy Roosevelt understood this. Occupy Hot Topic does not.

The other reason I don’t care probably has more to do with me not being young anymore, but not quite being old yet, either. Francois Guisot once said something that Georges Clemenceau stole that was, in turn, stolen by Winston Churchill when he said, “Show me a young Conservative and I’ll show you someone with no heart. Show me an old Liberal and I’ll show you someone with no brains.”

Yeah, what he (they) said.

The Occupy protests are, by and large, a youth movement while the Tea Party is, primarily, an old person movement. Maybe not quite elderly, but there aren’t many people in it under 40, and most of its members are pushing walkers to the bank to cash their Social Security checks so they can buy their geriatric prescriptions with Medicare at Wal-Mart. Generalities of both groups to be sure, but they’re still more or less accurate.

With me being in my mid-30s, maybe I’m just too old to get passionate about being liberal, but too young to get riled up about kids playing on my lawn and stealing my hard-earned whatevers with their socialist taxes or something. I’m still not sure what most Tea Party people are mad about, mostly because I’ve never been able to accurately translate a single one of their protest signs. In fact, about the only thing I know of the Tea Party is that they think grammar is something that happens to other people. That, and they hate taxes. But they still pay them. Because they’re sissies.

And so are the protestors in the Occupy crowd. How many 99%ers swarmed corporate stores on Black Friday to buy corporate products during an increasingly corporate-dominated holiday season? A lot. Because they just don’t get it. And they’re sissies.

One 99%er told me that it’s fine to want to stand on principle, but when Christmas day rolls around, your kids aren’t going to have a very magical morning with nothing but homemade socks and knitted sweaters you bought from an independent seller off Etsy waiting under the tree. And it’s true – but what protestors on both sides need to understand is that, when you’re seeking revolution, standing on principle is the only thing you have.

You can’t rage against the machine while powering it on every morning. You have to shut it down, walk away and learn to live without it. The Tea Party can’t bring themselves to do this by just refusing to pay their taxes and facing the consequences, and the Occupy kiddies can’t do it because dammit, iPhones are just too darn cool.

I get the whole sacrificing-principles-for-your-kids thing, though. But I don’t support the 99%. Or the Tea Party. Or anything other than the one principle I have left in my life. But more on that in a minute.

Billy Joel once sang something in a lyric you’ve probably never heard from a song you’ve probably never listened to that said, “I once believed in causes, too. I had my pointless point of view. But life went on no matter who was wrong or right.”

And that’s me right now. I had causes and rage in my youth, and I’ll probably have them again when I get a little older. But for now, I just don’t care enough about any cause that would force me to sacrifice the one single principle I have left. And that’s the thing about causes: if you want them to succeed, you have to make sacrifices. The 99% don’t understand this. The Tea Party doesn’t understand this.

But I do.

And the one thing I won’t sacrifice? Giving my son the best possible childhood I can.

Sure, corporate greed is ruining the world. The free market is a myth and the benefits of competition in the marketplace are as illusory as the whispy clouds of bullshit on which they rest. Capitalism is a great system, but only as long as it’s kept in check by government. Allow it to run free from regulation and it’ll eat itself from the tail up like a Gordon Gekko-flavored ouroboros. Competition doesn’t exist in the age of the transnational megacorporation and the free market will no more correct itself than a dog will stop murdering its food dish when it’s full. Anyone who thinks differently is either stupid or already rich. Possibly both.

But what can I do about it? I’m not prepared to make the sacrifices necessary to provoke real change, and I’m not going to waste my time joining a movement with Stupid Sideburns over there, because he can’t resist a two for one sale on ironic t-shirts at Urban Outfitters for the sake of the movement. There’s just no future in it.

As it stands, I’ll continue to be motivated by the only thing that motivates me to do anything in this miserable world, and I’ll make sure he has the best life I can give him. Yes, I know that not helping to put an end to our corporate-controlled oligarchy isn’t exactly going to give him the brightest future, but I’m pretty sure that being pepper sprayed and arrested for locking arms with a bunch of kids with idiotic mustaches in a park somewhere isn’t going to do him any favors, either.

EDIT: It’s come to my attention that some readers are taking this post as me giving up due to hopelessness in the face of what I see as an unwinnable battle. Maybe it is; but I didn’t mean for it to come across that way. It wasn’t meant to be so much about hopelessness as it was about shifting priorities after you have a kid. I don’t have any numbers on this, but I’d be willing to bet that there aren’t many parents of small children in either movement, simply because there isn’t room in your life to fight the whole world when you’re fighting every day just to try and make your child’s life a little bit better. And if you’re not in the 1%, that means you don’t have time for revolution. You have to go to work and spend as much time with your kids as you can. The world can go to Hell, as far as I’m concerned. Maybe that changes when your kids are older and more self-reliant, but for young parents stuck between the righteous rage of youth and the indignant fury of old age, just surviving each day so you can give your child a better tomorrow is enough. Personally, while I love the world, I would burn it down along with everyone in it – including my friends, my family, even my wife – if it meant saving my son. That might be supremely selfish on my part, but there it is.

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NOTE:  I know times are hard and yeah, I need to make a living too, but if you want to read any of my books but can't afford to buy them right now, hit me up.

I'll take care of it.

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