More OWS stuff

Got this from my Dad;

Marybeth Hicks
Columnist
The Washington Times
Oct 20, 2011
Call it an occupational hazard, but I can’t look at the Occupy Wall
Street protesters without thinking, “Who parented these people?”
As a culture columnist, I’ve commented on the social and political
ramifications of the “movement” - now known as “OWS” - whose fairyland
agenda can be summarized by one of their placards: “ Everything for
everybody .”
Thanks to their pipe-dream platform, it’s clear there are people with
serious designs on “transformational” change in America who are using
the protesters like bed springs in a brothel. Yet it’s not my role as a
commentator that prompts my parenting question, but rather the fact
that I’m the mother of four teens and young adults. There are some
crucial life lessons that the protesters’ moms clearly have not passed
along. Here, then, are five things the OWS protesters’ mothers should
have taught their children but obviously didn’t, so I will:

• Life isn’t fair. The concept of justice - that everyone should be
treated fairly - is a worthy and worthwhile moral imperative on which
our nation was founded. But justice and economic equality are not the
same. Or, as Mick Jagger said, “You can’t always get what you want.”
No matter how you try to “level the playing field,” some people have
better luck, skills, talents or connections that land them in better
places . Some seem to have all the advantages in life but squander
them, others play the modest hand they’re dealt and make up the
difference in hard work and perseverance, and some find jobs on Wall
Street and eventually buy houses in the Hamptons . Is it fair? Stupid
question.

• Nothing is “free.” Protesting with signs that seek “free” college
degrees and “free” health care make you look like idiots, because
colleges and hospitals don’t operate on rainbows and sunshine. There
is no magic money machine to tap for your meandering educational
careers and “slow paths” to adulthood, and the 53 percent of taxpaying
Americans owe you neither a degree nor an annual physical . While I’m
pointing out this obvious fact, here are a few other things that are
not free: overtime for police officers and municipal workers, trash
hauling, repairs to fixtures and property, condoms, Band-Aids and the
food that inexplicably appears on the tables in your makeshift protest
kitchens. Real people with real dollars are underwriting your civic
temper tantrum .

• Your word is your bond. When you demonstrate to eliminate student
loan debt, you are advocating precisely the lack of integrity you
decry in others. Loans are made based on solemn promises to repay
them. No one forces you to borrow money ; you are free to choose
educational pursuits that don’t require loans, or to seek technical or
vocational training that allows you to support yourself and your
ongoing educational goals. Also, for the record, being a college
student is not a state of victimization. It’s a privilege that
billions of young people around the globe would die for - literally.

• A protest is not a party. On Saturday in New York , while making a
mad dash from my cab to the door of my hotel to avoid you, I saw what
isn’t evident in the newsreel footage of your demonstrations: Most of
you are doing this only for attention and fun. Serious people in a
sober pursuit of social and political change don’t dance jigs down
Sixth Avenue like attendees of a Renaissance festival. You look
foolish, you smell gross, you are clearly high and you don’t seem to
realize that all around you are people who deem you irrelevant.

• There are reasons you haven’t found jobs. The truth? Your tattooed
necks, gauged ears, facial piercings and dirty dreadlocks are
off-putting. Nonconformity for the sake of nonconformity isn’t a
virtue. Occupy reality: Only 4 percent of college graduates are out of
work. If you are among that 4 percent, find a mirror and face the
problem. It’s not them. It’s you