OWS Article Reflections

Discussing Matt Taibbi’s article in class reinforced one thing for me: as a generation, we are relatively unconcerned with a lot of the things happening in the world around us. Occupy Wall Street is at the moment a rather innocuous event in comparison to international issues with Iran and the military conflicts in Afghanistan and other places in the Middle East. But that does not make it unimportant, especially when a large number of the protestors are recent college graduates without jobs or any professional prospects.

I cannot speak for everyone, but personally I think a lot about the number of student loans currently in my name, that at the end of just this year I will be in overwhelming debt with no choice but to let it sit and gather interest while I study and try to make the most out of my time at Champlain. Everyone insists that the turnaround will be worth it “in the end,” but at the age of nineteen it is hard to put into perspective a time when five figures of debt won’t be a constant burden.   

Occupy Wall Street represents the catch-22 that is a college education: there are hardly any options professionally for a person that possesses only a high school diploma, but what is the point of going to college when a person accumulates on average $25,000 in debt and does not have a job come graduation?

Taibbi’s article really impressed me because it offered a brand new way of looking at a movement that before had been painted in a really negative light by the media. Hypothesizing that the entire movement is about much more than the 99% versus the 1%, Taibbi offered a blanketed challenge to our generation.

In a mere four years—an incredibly short amount of time, in all reality—we will be the ones faced with debt and minimal job opportunities, unless someone takes the initiative and makes a change. That is what OWS represents to me, a challenge to our generation to be the initiative for no other reason than our own success in the future. It is unsettling that as a society interests abound in national issues only when that issue reaches its boiling point. We as a generation should have enough respect for our futures to fight for our dreams before OWS becomes a cultural dysphemism that is akin to Afghanistan and Iran, to promote the positive power of the movement and make the change.