The Occupier's Manifesto

The Occupier’s Manifesto

(my apologies to The Mentor)

Another one got pepper sprayed and arrested today—it’s in all the blogs.  “Occupied Wall Street Protest Gets Ugly.”  Damn protestors, they’re all alike.

But did you ever stop to think, unplug from your cushy upper-middle-class-baby-booming-GenX life and ask yourself why these Americans are so outraged?  I am an activist, enter my world…

My world begins at work.  I’m an underpaid cost consultant for the advertising agencies on Madison Avenue.  I’m smarter than most of my coworkers and my managers feel threatened by me.  Damn nonconformist, they’re all alike. 

I made a discovery today: A Demonstration.  A group of people who are as disgusted by our failed healthcare, financial and education systems as I am.  This group doesn’t shut me up if I speak at a meeting.  There’s no performance review here.  If I have a health concern, the people in The Park don’t tell me, “your health insurance doesn’t cover that.”  If I feel the group is moving in the wrong direction, I can say so, without fear of being fired. 

Suddenly it spread like wildfire across the country.  Tens of thousands of protestors united by the common bond that America does not have to remain a place where only the rich thrive.  People with jobs that could be more rewarding; people with one or two college degrees, with aspirations for the America their parent’s had—people with vision. 

I feel cheated by my country.  When I was a kid you told me to work hard, attend college and get a job in Manhattan.  I did all of this, yet it’s impossible for me to pay my mortgage, save for retirement and put a kid through college—what my parents did for me.  Damn spoiled brat, they’re all alike.

You take my tax money, use it to wage wars so your friends can get rich, lie to me and tell me it’s for my own good and when your same friends squander away all their profits, you ask me to bail you out.    

Like any other 29 year old New Yorker, I’m concerned with my career.  My company pays me enough to pay my bills and eat, but anything else is a stretch.  If I want to buy Christmas presents for my girlfriend, I have to get a second job.  A second job just so I can buy things people don’t need from a store that probably treats their employees worse than I’m treated at my first job!  Damn ungrateful 20-something, they’re all alike.

And then it hit me, like a person who is drowning wishes he were hit with a life preserver: Occupy Wall Street can work.  Demonstration is back in Democracy.  Democracy is back in America.  Activism is the new black.  A revolution which will rival the antiwar movements of the Sixties has already begun and it is too late for it to be stopped. 

No longer will students with no prospects of a career be relegated to their bedroom at their parent’s house.  No longer will disaffected workers, given raises that are less than the rate of inflation (if they even get a raise) have to squirrel themselves away in their cubicles.  No longer will the workers of America shut up.  We will not be silent. 

I am an activist and this is my manifesto.  You may stop me, but you cannot stop us all.  After all, we’re all alike. 

[This piece is an adaptation of The Hacker Manifesto, by The Mentor]