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Sweet Flying Spaghetti Monster, I love the fact that Chris Hayes is introducing into the national dialog concepts that you don't hear on any other weekend news show. In discussing the Occupy protests and the website We Are The 99 Percent, Hayes notes that in entry after entry, self-identified 99 percenters point to crippling student loan debt.
And it's so very sad and so true. Society tells us that we go to school, get a degree, write our own ticket. We're supposed to be a meritocracy where effort and a little bit of luck puts us on the path to the American Dream: a house, 2.4 kids, dog in the backyard and a nice middle-class life.
That was then. This is now.
That American Dream is dead for the generation coming into adulthood now. The middle class is a dying breed. More and more of us are simply the working poor with little relief in sight. And that's the injustice that the 99 percenters are fighting to right. We all want our kids to have it better than we have. We don't want their potentials limited by debt and the excesses and greed of Wall Streeters and the politicians that are lying to us. Don't tell us that the meritocracy still exists when we can see clearly that we are ruled by an oligarchy that can't see past their own grasping need for as much money in the next quarter's earning report.
It's not the first time that the country has been so economically unbalanced. And I have faith that we will find that balance again. I just wonder if the oligarchy realizes that historically, each time we've fought for more equality, things have not ended well for them.
It won't this time, either.