Forum Post: To the self-made people on here who take issue with OWS

Here's the thing; I'm pretty much on the same track as you are; I came from a working poor family in the Bronx and through the support of my family and my community I made it to MIT. On a personal level I don't have much patience for people who want to be rewarded for screwing around, smoking weed, and expecting a week's wages without doing a week's work. On that I'm pretty sure we agree.

That said, the people I described above tend to be the canaries in the coal mine; generally when they start protesting there actually is something wrong. The first thing that got me when I went down to Zuccotti was the number of people there who weren't the stereotypical stinky hippies. Many were unemployed teachers, nurses, blue-collar workers, etc. who lost their jobs due to outsourcing and other such corrosive action by big business. That for me was what lends OWS its legitimacy.

Why? Because I look at people like that and I look at what's happened to our economy and our middle class and our manufacturing sector and my first thought was "That could have been me." My whole family, myself included, worked our asses off to get my sister and I ahead (I'm at MIT, she's an honors student at Bronx Science), and even then there were discrete factors outside of our hard work that made our ascent possible.

First off, my father was lucky enough to still have a union job, and this meant that we all had the option of living off the one income, as tough as that was, so that my mom could homeschool us. If his union had been broken much earlier than it was, my sister and I would have wound up in an inner-city school where neither of us would have had much of a shot. When the plant he worked at finally did close, a combination of private help from the community and government aid in the form of Food Stamps gave us enough money to cover the rent and keep my sister and I at Bronx Science.

Looking back at that, what strikes me is that many of the policies that OWS is protesting are policies that cost people like you and I vital opportunities to move up. Yes, we made it up anyway, but depending on where America goes from here stories like ours may get rarer and rarer. By attacking bastions of the working class and working poor like unions, government aid, and the minimum wage, many of the corporate policies OWS is protesting actually make it harder for the children of these groups to become self-made men. These policies also weaken and corrode entire communities, meaning that the safety net we so desperately needed for those few months when things were bad may not be there for the next guy. Like I said, I do what I do based on policy rather than people; if what the people in Zuccotti are fighting is bad policy I don't care what they smoke or how often they do or don't wash; they and I have a common goal and I'll stand with them until that goal is achieved. The enemy of my enemy may not be my friend, but he's sure as hell my ally.