Should college students be "occupying" anything? Shouldn't people who live in the projects be mad?

Everyone should be mad. Why limit it to just one group?

Here in Northern California the Occupy Cal and Occupy UC Davis have been about the continued cuts in funding and the continued increase in tuition and fees, while the administrators get huge increases. And it is also a recognition that the misbalanced tax structure has put us in this position.

People from the housing projects would certainly be welcome at any of the Occupy camps.

Occupy people demonstrate all you want, I am with you. Just do not arm yourselves or use harmful tactics with the police. Then, it becomes a riot and riots are felonies in all the states. This can be a killing offense and our country does not need this.

I say use your brain and boycott something of real value to Wall Street. Hitting these people in their pocketbooks is where they really will take notice of your intentions. Everyone must stick together…..there is power in numbers.

This is America and not Libya.

Good question.

“By going to college we can be insured that we will most likely make above average money” – nope, look up all the people here and don’t make life about ‘the projects’ vs. ‘everyone else’ – poverty is more widespread than you know and many in the projects aren’t poor, they’re just involved in the underground economy.

How do you know people in the projects aren’t Occupying?

College kids are the only answer that makes sense. People much older than college can’t risk getting fired or going to jail by going to these protests, as they have children and elderly parents to care for.

It doesn’t matter who you are, anyone can see what’s going on between government and people with money.

@Aethelflaed Because I grew up in the projects, trust me, the only thing they’d be going to Downtown for is to make a quick buck off some pot.

@whitetigress Ah. See, I was under the impression that no one experience was the experience of that community. But I see I was mistaken.

@whitetigress So no one in the projects ever goes to college? ‘Cause, I’m assuming, there is no pot in college?

@Simone_De_Beauvoir I grew up in the projects. I go to college. I’m over this question just a bunch of gang tackling, as usual.

@whitetigress Hello kettle, you’re black. (the racial pun not intended)...I am not one to think that anyone is a representative of ‘their people’ so to speak but that means you’re not to speak for them either.

@john65pennington How many times should the protesters let themselves get beaten and abused—how many times should we allow the police to break the law and become laws unto themselves—before they are justified in fighting back? What if they arm themselves for self-defense?

Sic semper tyrannis, even if it wears a badge.

@whitetigress I just went to an Occupy Boston march this past week. It’s the first time I have wittnessed up close who was there. I saw everything from college professors to maids and janitors. THere were a large contingent of people out of work. When not out looking for a job, they said they devoted the rest of their time to protesting.

The right is doing everything they can with their impressive propaganda machine to recast the OWS movement as a class war with the poor who already get so very much wanting to take more from the rich. That is as opposite as you could get it. Most Big Lie political propaganda is. The protests are about the fact that while middle class income has stayed nearly flat for 30 years now, the income of the top 1% has gone up by over 300%. Their taxes have been cut by 62% in that time, and thousands of tax loopholes available only to the rich have been inserted into the tax code.

The middle class has shrunk from 65% of the population in 1980 to 46% today. The ranks of the poor have grown accordingly. The top 1% have gone from owning 33% of the nation’s financial wealth in 1980 to holding 42% today. We are heading toward being a banana republic, and most Americans don’t want that, even quite a few of the wealthiest 1%.

@whitetigress, this isn’t to diminish your sense of outrage, but to maybe challenge some assumptions in your question.

I’m not saying who should and shouldn’t be protesting, but for the poor how is today different from any other day? What’s the difference between being in the bottom 30% (or whatever) on a day when the rich and the middle class split things 50/50 vs a day when the rich and the middle class split things 90/10? I’m not saying I like this or that this is how OWS is breaking down demographically, I’m just asking how is the experience of poor people measurably different to the extent that it is more important now to buck the system than to carry on surviving?

as a corollary, one thing that’s useful to understand about human behavior is that frequently people resist change until it is too uncomfortable to do anything but change (e.g. hitting rock bottom).

Take a lesson from history (or at least my vague understanding of this chapter…) During Viet Nam, who was doing the protesting and who was being drafted? Again it was college students doing the protesting and poor people (I believe) being drafted. I think what you are perceiving relative to this split between protest expectations of the poor and the educated is a function of each cohort’s expectations, understanding and (perceived) competence relative to political engagement. There was a question a few weeks ago about the merits of a petition to forgive student loans. Again, it was a myopic, college-educated crowd essentially asking for a bailout because they were “sophisticated” enough to believe that forgiving the debts of 10% of the U.S. population would literally fix the entire economy.

Secondly, I would encourage you not to take the idea of debt (and I assume you mean national debt) personally. The reality is that you or “your generation” will never be made to account for that debt in terms of taking money out of your pocket to pay it down to zero. It doesn’t work that way, even though the news and other outlets hold this over our heads as if we are personally responsible. IMHO, you are much better off just ignoring this notion altogether, although others may disagree. I would also encourage you to learn about the concept of odious debt. It’ll make you feel better.

Thirdly, other than for their gullibility, perhaps, don’t blame the previous generation for the current mess. We are all led by the nose, yourself and your generation included, to support shit that is mess-making. (U.S.) politics is, in part, a process of fooling the masses to get power and then using that power to enrich people who are not the masses. The fooling process begins very early in life (in arenas other than politics, usually), and it’s very difficult to correct. The stupid decisions that people made 20 years ago or 40 years ago or more were at least partly manufactured by power hungry people who relentlessly advertised supposed benefits of adopting a certain way of thinking to get the masses on board. The same is happening today on a much more sophisticated scale, so don’t think that some twenty-something isn’t going to be looking at you in 40 years feeling incredulous at your generation’s gullibility.

I don’t know how poor people do not feel outrage every day or how they stuff their outrage at the injustices in their lives. It baffles me sometimes. I’ve lived in material comfort my entire life and am college educated and spent much of my waking hours in anguish over how fucked up things are universally. In the end, I don’t think it is affirming to be ignorant or to be battered into submissiveness or to be anguished. Probably it’s better to just be good to yourself and to other people, but it requires letting go of these giant ideas that seem so important (and important for thoughtful, educated people to solve). Relative to this problem, there’s nothing to solve really but the problem of greed (or whatever you want to call it), and that likely cannot be solved without some Ghandi-like clarity of perception.

@XD The very obvious difference in being poor with a deprived middle class and being poor with a thriving middle class is that to get to a comfortable lifestyle, you have a far greater number pf percentage points to climb. From 1930 till 1980, we were lifting poor people up out of poverty and moving them into the middle class. Since the Greedy Oligarch Pigs restructured things for the benefit of the 1% back in 1980, we have been pushing people back out of the middle class into poverty. That makes the task of pulling yourself up by the bootstraps far more daunting—and for most pf our poor, beyond their dreams.