ephemera - rant

December 30, 2012

rant

Every day I realize more and more that we’re a generation full of entitlement without any responsibility. We’re handed freedom, an education, and the opportunity to succeed but we still think we deserve more. We’ve never seen famine, war, oppression — and we take it all for granted.

Here’s an idea: instead of complaining about the system, about how people are richer and more successful than you, how about aspiring to that level? They, or their parents, obviously did something to get themselves there.

Because here’s the thing. You’re not special. I’m not special. We don’t deserve anything we don’t work for, and we’re not entitled to anything more than what we’re given. Is that really that hard to understand?

And also — nobody’s oppressing you. You’re not oppressed and there is no corporate conspiracy to kill the poor, sorry to disappoint. Look around you at everything you own — someone financed the production of that product, some bank provided the capital to create it and some entrepreneur designed it and created it, in order to provide it to you and give jobs to the people who made it. Without the so-called ‘big banks’ and ‘big corporations’ we wouldn’t have the innovation and jobs we have today. You can vilify them all you want but they’re what make the world work.

So take some responsibility for your own choices and your own actions in life. Don’t look at the rich and say “hey, I deserve some of that money and power”, say “I want to work to get there”.

Man. Sometime we’ll be in the same place and I’ll have the opportunity to explain to you why a lot of this is wrong and you’ll be able to look at my face and see that I’m speaking from experience and not trying to be a condescending douchebag. But right now I don’t have the spoons to break this down line by line, so I’m just going to make a few notes in response to this and hope you seriously take the time to think them through.

Not all of us are handed freedom, an education, and the opportunity to succeed. I was, more or less; from what I know of you, you were. But there are millions of Americans (and I assume Canadians) who are born into families deep in debt, who will take on debt their entire lives in an attempt to get out of whatever godforsaken inner city or deep rural area they were born into—or worse, who will never have that opportunity because their parents don’t know enough about credit to help them get it and it’s not advertised to them. There are millions who do not receive the comfortable middle-class or upper-middle-class education you and I received, because their parents cannot move them into school districts that have silly little things like whole roofs and windows, and who are raised in a culture that teaches them to believe that higher education is even more useless and unobtainable than the excuse for a school system the state put them through when they could have been starting to make money.
No one is complaining that someone is richer and more successful than them. I think there are very few people who think that simply by virtue of existing, they deserve to be the richest and most successful people ever to live. What people do think is that maybe just a few of the rarefied strata of wealth available only to super-millionaires, those who have the personal wealth to finance the construction of entire school systems, could be avoided in favour of a slightly better chance at a future for those who struggle to put food on the table or keep a roof over their families. They think that maybe, if someone is a so-called “job creator”, they should be spending some of the absurd wealth they have accrued to do silly things like actually create jobs, rather than just sitting on it and occasionally breathing financial ruination upon the rest of us from inside their absurdly comfortable homes, much like Smaug in the depths of Erebor.
No one’s special. But I happen to believe we’re human, and we should be working for the betterment of our species, and that means we should make sure that no one is starving, no one is homeless, and no one goes without the medical care they need. And we have come so much closer to realising that dream within our parents’ lifetime, let alone our grandparents’; I won’t be turned back from it because you feel that that dream is somehow entitlement. I personally have all of these things right now, and I am willing to pay a little bit more because I have them to make sure that others do as well. I expect the same from those who could buy and sell me fifty times over. That’s not entitlement. That’s empathy, and humanity, and the desire to always strive for better. I’m not entitled to anything more than I was given, but the millions of babies born to those in back-breaking poverty every year surely are, and I’d like to remembered as someone who tried to give it to them.
Nobody is oppressing me. You’re exactly right. I am a 25-year-old able-bodied cis straight white man in America. The only thing keeping me from winning privilege bingo is my nontheism, and quite frankly that doesn’t matter unless I want to run for office or join a hundreds-strong local organisation of like-minded people. But no, no one made any product for me. They made it for themselves—to make money and, in some very rare cases, because they believed it would make the world better. But you know better than to confuse capitalism with charity, and it’s disingenuous to suggest otherwise in this post. The reason people are angry at banks isn’t because they finance the creation of MacBooks and affordable flat-pack shelving. It’s because they also sometimes behave irresponsibly with the money we have entrusted them with. It’s because those big banks and big corporations—not so-called, they really are that big—receive aid from the government when they heedlessly plunge over fiscal cliffs, while the government refuses to similarly protect the people who pay taxes into it. It’s because of phrases like “too big to fail” that really mean money is being handed to companies run by people rich enough to finance their own private space programs, when those people should be taking the first hit and paying back into the companies that have made them so successful. It’s because someone is getting a free ride, and it’s not the people who actually need it.

I’ve taken responsibility for myself, thanks. I have shit-tons of debt to pay off, but I’m on my way and I’m going to get it done. Now I’d like to take responsibility for some of the people who, due to circumstances beyond their control, can’t do that. And I’d like those who are better off than me to help, please. Because we’re all human—and we all deserve freedom, education, and the chance to succeed.

8:58pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZnopayaaRfO2

(Notes: 10)