- Icarus tragically realized this when he approached the sun using waxen wings.
- Winston Smith learned this before being brought to Room 101.
- Howard Beale had this explained to him by his boss, Arthur Jensen, in the 1976 movie “Network”.
- Rollerball veteran Johnathan E. understood this but refused to accept it.
…and now, Chicago’s Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement has learned the same lesson: There are institutions and forces more industrious, powerful, organized, durable, entrenched, and lasting than the “Occupy” movement could ever…possibly…be.
Their lesson is thanks to the action of one or more of the “1%” they are protesting against, who took a little time out of their busy schedules to deliver a truthful, responsible dose of reality to the OWS protesters via a shower of leaflets having the following text:
“We are Wall Street. It’s our job to make money. Whether it’s a commodity, stock, bond, or some hypothetical piece of fake paper, it doesn’t matter. We would trade baseball cards if it were profitable. I didn’t hear America complaining when the market was roaring to 14,000 and everyone’s 401k doubled every 3 years. Just like gambling, its not a problem until you lose. I’ve never heard of anyone going to Gamblers Anonymous because they won too much in Vegas.
Well now the market crapped out, & even though it has come back somewhat, the government and the average Joes are still looking for a scapegoat. God knows there has to be one for everything. Well, here we are.
Go ahead and continue to take us down, but you’re only going to hurt yourselves. What’s going to happen when we can’t find jobs on the Street anymore? Guess what: We’re going to take yours. We get up at 5am & work till 10pm or later. We’re used to not getting up to pee when we have a position. We don’t take an hour or more for a lunch break. We don’t demand a union. We don’t retire at 50 with a pension. We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is on your dinner plates, we’ll eat that.
For years teachers and other unionized labor have had us fooled. We were too busy working to notice. Do you really think that we are incapable of teaching 3rd graders and doing landscaping? We’re going to take your cushy jobs with tenure and 4 months off a year and whine just like you that we are so-o-o-o underpaid for building the youth of America. Say goodbye to your overtime and double time and a half. I’ll be hitting grounders to the high school baseball team for $5k extra a summer, thank you very much.
So now that we’re going to be making $85k a year without upside, Joe Mainstreet is going to have his revenge, right? Wrong! Guess what: we’re going to stop buying the new 80k car, we aren’t going to leave the 35 percent tip at our business dinners anymore. No more free rides on our backs. We’re going to landscape our own back yards, wash our cars with a garden hose in our driveways. Our money was your money. You spent it. When our money dries up, so does yours.
The difference is, you lived off of it, we rejoiced in it. The Obama administration and the Democratic National Committee might get their way and knock us off the top of the pyramid, but it’s really going to hurt like hell for them when our fat asses land directly on the middle class of America and knock them to the bottom.
We aren’t dinosaurs. We are smarter and more vicious than that, and we are going to survive. The question is, now that Obama & his administration are making Joe Mainstreet our food supply…will he? and will they?”
Is capitalism perfect? Nope, and it’s not even close. But, history has shown that there is always going to be a a small group of people who are either rich, powerful, controlling… or some combination of the three. It doesn’t matter what “-ism” is used to govern / control / pacify the masses (Marxism, Socialism, Communism, Capitalism, or any other “-ism”), what kind of governing system is used (Democracy, Republic, Parliamentary, Monarchy, Dictatorship, etc.), or whether or not this small group is organized (eg: Illuminati, Bilderbergs, Stonecutters… whatever!), history’s lesson is still the same:
Every society that has ever been and will ever be will have “rich” people within it no matter how collectively “poor” it is. (and, by “rich” I mean whatever it is that the society uses to define wealth: money, land, food, weapons, minerals, information, workers, etc.)
Faced with such an inevitability, I’m sticking with the only economic system that has, throughout history, provided the best opportunity for the vast majority of people to become as rich as they want to be: Capitalism.
(Thanks to Pat Dollard’s “Bring It On, ‘We Are Smarter And More Vicious’: Wall Street Responds With Leaflet Bomb On #OccupyChicago” posted 10/26/11 on the blog “The War Starts Here!”, for the text of the leaflet)
