Forum Post: I've already said it before, but here it is again for those who won't listen.

Who said that we wanted to overthrow/destroy/end capitalism or even Wall Street? There's always a group of communists or anarchists or conspiracy theorists or flat-out crazies that will get involved with something like this because they believe our willingness to accept anyone with a desire to help fix things gives them a blank check to do as they choose and then sign it with our names.

Incidentally, I'm fully behind the protests, and I'm a computer science major at MIT. Underachiever? Pfft. Don't make me laugh; if you can call three to four hours of sleep per night underachieving then I want to see your schedule. I came from a working-class to poor family and I'm on track to make six figures in five or ten years even if things don't turn around. And yet somehow I'm still behind these people. Why?

Because my family went through hell in order to put my sister and I on the track we are now; my mom left a teaching job to homeschool my sister and I to keep us out of a dysfunctional inner-city school system, so we've been living on one rather precarious income since I was three. My dad's union job got through almost to the end, until a hedge fund by the name of Brynwood Partners took over and decided to break the union. We would not have survived the resulting eleven-month strike and plant closure were it not for a combination of unemployment benefits, food stamps when the chips were really down, and a strong community that really cared for us when we needed it most.

Here's the thing: because of our family and community my sister and I were uniquely equipped to weather the storm that hit us; not everyone is so lucky. Any number of small things could have derailed us at that point, and for every one of me who makes it through there are ten more who through no fault of their own get screwed out of an opportunity to move up.

I was raised the old-fashioned way; life doesn't owe you one particular outcome over another. Life doesn't owe anyone a job simply by virtue of their existence. Jobs, wealth, happiness: all of these things are earned. The one and only thing in this country that a man is owed is a free and fair opportunity to better himself, and it is these opportunities that have been drying up over the past three decades.

In the old days, if you were good with your hands and willing to work you could get top-notch vocational training and hold down a solid middle-class career with just a high school diploma (or sometimes not even that). In the old days, the ordinary American had opportunity after opportunity available to him and all that was asked of him in return was that he get off his ass and grab one.

These days, that's all drying up. Vocational training of the old sort is dying out, and half the new sort is provided by for-profit "colleges" that often screw unsuspecting students. Academic degrees leading to the professions are hardly for everyone, and whole groups of people get closed out of that game before they even realize they're playing. Getting a decent job of the type that sustained our parents and grandparents is getting more and more difficult.

In short, OWS and its affiliate movements will be happy to stop stinking up your parks and get jobs if you will point the protesters toward opportunities they can reasonably be expected to be able to take advantage of. Until then, they will stay exactly where they are and grow stronger and stronger until the system has no choice but to make these opportunities available to them again. And I will stand with them.