Frankie Huang
Ms. Williams
English 1A
10 December 2013
The
Occupy Movement
Poverty, an issue brought up in the Occupy Movement, has
grown to touch those who were once in the middle class. The
continued belief that we’re still better off than the person who lives out on
the street is not helping either, it is just pushing us farther apart from each
other, dividing the growing poverty class, and that is what the wealthiest
people in America want to happen. We talk down about
those who are doing worse than us though because “We all want to feel like we
have some sort of stature in life” (Smiley, West). With a divided poverty
class, the wealthy are able to keep on taking money away from the rest of us
and living their overly lavish life styles. Those in poverty are
too distracted from believing that those who are in poverty are lazy,
criminals, drug addicts, or uneducated to figure out that the wealthy are just
distracting themselves so large corporations are able to control the world in a
way that undermines democracy and benefits only the rich.
Our neighbors may look
like they’re not as better off than us, but that could be an understatement. We
want to say that so it would make ourselves feel better about our economic
state.
It
keeps us from helping one another and distracts us from the big problem. What
this problem is large corporations taking our money away from us for themselves. A
great example would be the bank bailout a few years back. Big
banks needed money and we paid them out of our own pockets but still let the
companies go under and gave their employees large bonuses. It
wasn’t an idea that we came up with together though. Large
corporations and the government came up with it. We let this happen and
we need to fix it. If we don’t unite and
fight for what is right, we will more than likely see another Depression.
With
a government controlled by wealth, all we can see in the future is instability. We
fear that fighting for what we really want would bring us farther into poverty
because it would mean that we could lose our jobs that give use wages that we
need to live; even if those wages are substantially low. With
the emergence of the Occupy Movement, the gap dividing the poor is closing and
bringing all of us together, making us more willing to fight against the
wealthy. “We Americans have sacrificed
and fought hard together for the common good throughout our history once we
truly understood what we were sacrificing and fighting for” (Smiley, West 186). Though
even with this movement going on, not many of us can spare the time to protest
against big business because you might miss a paycheck and or possibly get
fired.
It
is troubling that if we try to fight for economic and political equality it
could potentially set you back even further into poverty, placing us in this
spot where we want to fight but we can’t because we are working for these big
businesses in order to survive. It’s this vicious cycle that keeps us from
fighting that we must break.
American
citizens have dealt with harsh dilemmas before and we will still be able to now
and in the future. We fought in wars and
against economic fallout. We are able to endure
anything that gets in our way. We cannot do that
though if we aren’t united.
