Everyone should try not to be a person*

My advice to young people, as always, is don't let anyone sucker you into thinking you should do or be anything. That's how they get you.



One of my central criticisms of the Occupy movement is that it is populated by ambitious yuppies who allowed their ego to buy them into this con. Their complaint boils down to they specifically haven't been allowed to rise in accordance with what they imagine they deserve by virtue of having indebted themselves.

In this regard, the protesters (Time's "Person of the Year", BTW) are the intellectual compatriots of Newt Gingrich. When Newt tells us that schoolchildren need to be put to cleaning bathrooms because poor people "have no habit of working" he's essentially telling us the same thing the Occupy protesters are telling us only from the other end. They've already agreed to scrub up the shit. Hell, in New Orleans, they've proven they can get shit cleaned up more cheaply than the city can. Now that they've proven their inherent worth. Now why isn't someone rewarding those awesome work habits?

Here is a post I read this morning by the insufferably immodest Nicholas Payton which I nonetheless recommend because it touches on much the same argument I've been making all along. Payton veers into some unnecessary and meaningless prescription for "living authentic lives" and "connecting to your center" or whatever self-absorbed crap people like Payton pick up from their publicists and beauticians. But his diagnosis of the 99% movement as essentially yet another manifestation of self-seeking white upper middle class elitism... is right on target.

This movement has to do with ego. It’s akin to the hippies who needed to go out and “find themselves” knowing they had six-figure lives awaiting them once they returned home. It’s just like all these carpetbagging mothafuckas who came to New Orleans post-Katrina who think it’s cool to not bathe and play their version of bad New Orleans music in the streets. We played in the streets to earn money for our families, to continue the tradition of our ancestors. It’s a hobby to some of these kids. They come here and make a mockery of our traditions because they think it’s cool to be a revolutionary. Then, some of these carpetbaggers feel like they want to educate the world, including locals, about something they “discovered.” Yeah, like Christopher Columbus discovered America. Newsflash: it was already here!

We’re here because the powers that be have been stingy and greedy with all the money. It’s only become a problem because now they are victims of their selfishness. I could care less, they didn’t give a fuck when it wasn’t them. The Occupy movement may be a start, but outside of that, it’s pretty empty. Let’s see what follows. That will really determine where people’s heads are. But at this point, the OWS is just a big circle jerk.

As we head into 2012 and more and more of us begin reading political tea leaves, it will be important to note that this so-called 99% is a frustrated iteration of the same economic and intellectual elitism espoused by the conservative ruling class of the Obama-Gingrich axis. We will return to this point when we begin to think about its impact on the electoral cycle.

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