Root and Entitlement

Last Friday afternoon, "Occupy San Francisco" held a brief rally outside the Wells Fargo building. During the rally, half a dozen or so "speakers" stood up on the back of a pick-up truck and addressed the crowd through out-speakers. I have never held any decent regard for the occupy movements. Occupy Denver is basically a camp ground for homeless people and tramps who usually hang out around downtown. "Freak Show" has been my only definition of this movement.

However, Occupy SF is slightly different, I thought the much more diverse crowd (students, mid-aged working men and women, ethnic groups, the sick, the homeless, and of course, the hippies) would pose a much stronger argument to effect the changes. I even secretly erased my prejudice as I saw the crowd marched and gathered. But I was quickly disillusioned.

A student-looking girl came forward and assumed the loudspeaker. There came a long and sad story of working class father declaring bankruptcy, defaulted home seized by the evil bank, and a young and frail girl crushing under mountains of student loan. The moral of the story seems to be, that without the evil bank lurking to profit and rob the family by mortgage and student loans, the hard-working father can avoid the fate of bankruptcy and girl can live happily with other anthropology/psychology/whatever useless social science major students. But here is the fact, she graduated from a private university with $200,000 of student loan and no job.

Her sad story is immediately followed by a longer, even more emotion-charged accusation, or may I say, a slurry of communist slogans pointing fingers at the major banks who issued the loans. She demanded total elimination of her loan (every penny of that $200,000). I simply couldn't believe my ears. What heartless bastard would go out for a $50,000/year education for four years while the family was in financial distress? And how dare her to demand a clean slate again without even the slightest determination to work for it? It seems to me that she felt entitled to the highest quality education even though she apparently couldn't afford one.

The freak show goes on.