Occupy A Desk Job

It all ended quite badly, yet fairly predictably, for the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement in Zucotti Park in Manhattan, New York City this week.  Since September this year, the site has been the sordid base camp for the movement, who used it as a staging ground for never-ending whingy, whiney riots through Wall Street in the Manhattan financial district.

The owners of the park were powerless to prevent the repugnant lack of sanitation that occurs when thousands of people set up camp and refuse to shower for weeks. Although, after constant pleas by the park owners, the itinerants thoughtfully asked each other to stop devastating the flower beds.

This camp was all very interesting, given they were all about horizontalism, which apparently means no organised hierarchy (so get your mind out of the gutter).  And eveyone was supposed to work together in a harmonious fashion and self-organise and self-regulate et cetera.  Yet, given that they relieved themselves in the flower beds, I thought it would have been a no brianer to nominate someone to fetch the toilet paper.

After many botched attempts to move the diehards, the NYPD were finally given their balls back by city officials, and proceeded to eject the lot of them out of the vicinity. Nice one, Mayor Bloomberg.

So what are these passionate-about-anything-but-working-for-a-living people grumbling about anyway? Well the messages they are trying to articulate are so muddled that they could be protesting about the high fat content in their granola for all I know.  

When you don't have a clear, concise message you tend to come off looking like you are a shallow twenty-something whose father has just cut off your pocket money because you are too lazy to get a real job like the rest of us.  A real job being something you don't really want to do but, hey, it pays the bills.  And buys entire seasons of television programs in boxed sets.

The problem with these protesting leftists is that they think we have to get rid of extremes of wealth, power and status, or people will become morally bankrupt wankers with no social responsibility, and then there will be so much resentment and conflict that the economy will simply collapse. In fact the opposite is true; the economy thrives when people don’t interfere with it. 

They just want to overthrow the status quo for something far worse; like socialism, where we'll all be poor and miserable together and they'll be no more kiddies lemonade stands (because they are EVIL capitalist breeding grounds) or anything else that involves making dirty, sexy money.  And that's pretty much everything.

But being a leftist means never having to explain yourself, which is fortunate for the young American occupier who quit his teaching job because it wasn't fulfilling enough for him and went to 'study' puppetry - his passion - for three years at university. If you are stupid enough to think that the puppetry industry will sustain you and make you as wealthy as a hedge fund manager then…

There are important messages they could be progressing, but they are being lost in the nonsensical blithering of pretentious teenagers who want a free ride in life. I could understand if they were quibbling about the shortage of jobs in America, but the majority are preaching about their individual gripes with the world or just about their hatred of capitalism.

Of course, the beauty of capitalism is that it is a open system, and if you are prepared to work hard you can achieve anything you want. Thus, I can’t understand why anyone would disregard it; it's a ticket to ride! Not a free ride, but it can get you to where you want to be or out of where you are now, if that is your wish.

As far as these protesters are concerned, capitalism only favours the wealthy; thus, their target is those who have found extreme financial success through the system. Of course some entrepreneurs are going to make an extraordinary amount of money through business enterprises, but you have to be prepared to get involved, work hard, and be prepared to fail. 

The trouble with these protesting douche bags is they don't want to get a job which invloves working for the man, or the Government, but they want the bank balance of stock traders and hedge fund managers, while being their own boss in their highly lucrative, self-sustaining puppetry ventures.

Despite my protestations, I do actually have something in common with all these artists, students, leftist academics (are there any other type) occupiers.

I too have a desk job that I would prefer not to have to do. It's not rewarding, it's not meaningful, it's  bureaucratic, it's mediocre, I have very senior people above me who are unqualified morons who were hired by other unqualified morons, and I would rather stick a hot poker in my eye that turn up every day for the next twenty years. But being an adult (also known as kill-me-now syndrome) means having to do things you don’t want to do to pay the bills.

I too would like to engage in my own puppetry passion - which is writing, in my case - on a fulltime basis rather than working in a job that I don’t like, doesn’t inspire me, oozes mediocrity, and is trying really hard to grind my dreams into the dirt. But I think it’s best to find your feet and make your hobby financially sustainable before you quit the only thing keeping you from a life in the gutter.

Who the hell quits their job to study puppetry?  The unemployment rate in NYC is 9%, so I'm guessing the old puppetry positions aren't that easy to come by.  I studied at uni for seven years but I did not quit my job, BECAUSE THAT WOULD BE FUCKING* STUPID.

I've always thought that protesting a cause is how stupid people make themselves heard. The only way to elicit change is through policy, and the only way to do that is by direct action, and the best way to do that is to run for your local council as the local member of Parliament.

* Swear jar. Why did I self-impose no swearing on my blog? That was a stupid fucking idea.