Final

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.