Looking back at my life immediately following college, I've come to the conclusion that, to put it in terms the OWS crowd can understand, I suffered from low self-esteem and/or never got in touch with my inner child. Armed with my diploma and the aforementioned lack of self-worth, I secured my first post-graduate job: working as a cashier and a stock clerk in a Brooklyn liquor store. Even "worse?" I didn't mind it one bit.
How did I acquire such an attitude? Back in those days, which oddly enough were right smack in the middle of the reign of the second-most economically illiterate president this country has ever endured, the idea that certain jobs were beneath one's dignity didn't have the kind of cache' it does today. There weren't many people who had the "life better be a permanent upward glide path or it sucks" kind of outlook that has become so fashionable among the eternally aggrieved.
Unfortunately, it didn't work out. After I lost my job, I was forced to move back home, during which time I worked as a housepainter in order to build up enough of a stake to move back out on my own. Four months later, I moved into a sixth-floor walkup in the east nineties in Manhattan, a neighborhood then referred to as the DMZ between yuppieland and the ghetto.
In order to support myself, I dove head-first into my first experience with entrepreneurial self-determination: I became a cab driver on the night shift for one of the cab companies based in Queens. I consider the job entrepreneurial because, despite the fact that I didn't own the cab, the more I hustled the more I made. Again this is one of those pernicious attitudes that runs contrary to current zeitgeist, where simply showing up for work (most of the time) is considered as nose-to-the-grindstone as actually working. Understand, I make no claims of being unusual, as an honest day's work for an honest day's pay was the prevailing ethos at the time.
Eventually, I secured a "job" working as an arranger for Bruce Springsteen's first producer, long after Springsteen had departed. Job is in quotes because I didn't get paid at first. It became full-time and paying only after the producer became annoyed that our creative sessions were being cut short by my having to report for cab duty. He offered me two hundred and fifty dollars a week to stick around full-time. That was a bit of a pay cut, but I figured working in music had more of an upside.
I was right — but not for almost nine years. After I lost the arranger job, I painted offices, played in bands, taught SAT and study skills in Catholic high schools, and got married. After that, my wife and I got a huge break and ended up writing jingles for a living. I also got a job writing op-eds for the NY Post. For three years we earned enough money to be considered evil rich people. We saved most of it too, despite being musicians.
Unfortunately, a bad financial advisor lost most of it in the market, and we're right back behind the proverbial eight-ball, struggling to make ends meet, with no real upside in sight, mostly due to America's love affair with youth. We pay our own health insurance with a huge deductible to make it as affordable as possible and, once again, like so many other Americans, we don't really know where our next dollar is coming from.
Oh yeah, and one other thing: I've got about as much sympathy for the OWS crowd as I would a pimple on my butt.
Furthermore, I don't know which faction of the mob I feel less sorry for: a bunch of clueless kids who think the world owes them a living, or the odious combination of public sector union hacks, hypocrite rich celebrities, burnt out '60s hippies or devious politicians exploiting them for their useful idiot value. When I was a kid you wanted to become rich, not whine about the fact that someone else was and you weren't. And when you fell on your butt — which, fyi, is known as "failing" to anyone who hasn't been poisoned by a public school system that has virtually eliminated the concept — you got back up and got back in the game.
The trouble with the OWS movement is that it's centered around two concepts, both of which are abject lies. First and foremost, it doesn't represent ninety-nine percent of anything, no matter how many times the protesters themselves, their enablers, or a corrupt mainstream media repeats the slogan. Second, there is nothing inherently virtuous about being poor or middle class, any more than there is anything inherently evil about being wealthy. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar or a fool. Percentage-wise, there are just as many low-lifes on Main Street as there are on Wall Street, and if people don't like the direction in which this country is moving, they might want to consider the fact that the "everything is a shade of gray" moral relativism that afflicts this nation is the ultimate scourge. And make no mistake: it is a virus that infects every ethnic group, both genders and, as you may have guessed, every income class.
Until some kind of national integrity is restored, everything else comes down to dealing with the symptoms of the problem instead of the problem itself. How do you restore integrity? One self-aware person at a time coming to the realization that without it, you're nothing but the member of a mob, whether that mob resides in Zuccotti Park, a bank boardroom, or the Beltway in Washington, D.C.
You want to camp out all winter and rail against the inequities of the world? Knock yourself out. I'm hoping a writer's job or two opens up as a result. If that happens, I'll be right there with work samples and a resume. And if I don't get the gig, I'll be back the next time, and the time after that.
And if I never get the gig? They still build liquor stores and taxi cabs.
