My Message: An Introduction | Occupy Dallas

You can call me John. That's a nice, simple, generic name to use.

I first visited the Occupy Dallas group to see what they were all about, and decide whether I should put any energy behind it in support or not. You see, I have a job and I make a decent salary, and I've managed to get where I am in part through working very hard and taking some risks.

Some of the risks I've taken involved moving halfway across the country with very little in-pocket and not a lot of paper to back myself up when interviewing. Since first moving to Dallas I've tripled my salary, then had it cut to nearly a third in the recession, only to get it back to where it was before Wall Street took a dump on the American people.

But I've been lucky.

I say that I got where I am today "in part" through my own hard work and risk, because despite what many people like to believe about their own successes I know for a fact that I didn't get here alone. I've been afforded opportunities that many people, especially people here in Texas, just don't have access to. I've been given the opportunity to prove myself through hard work because I don't have a name that sounds different or foreign. I've had people at almost every step of the way in my life help me out, in small ways and large, to position me in a manner that lets me prove my worth and benefit from it.

I'm happy for my opportunities, but I'm appalled at how many people are denied these on a daily basis.

I've read or heard in comments from critics that the Occupy members need to just get jobs, or they need to "work hard" and "do the right things" to get themselves in a position where they don't have nothing (or less). Frankly, those sort of comments are just plain wrong. Those who think that all the Occupy members have to do is get a job to solve their problems have forgotten all of the opportunities they've manage to get, both large and small, that have allowed them to succeed. There's this indoctrinated mind-set that has taken hold in America that has a large number of people convinced that they've managed to get what they have on their own and by their own hands. That concept is a lie, and it exists because if we were to accept and acknowledge just how much the things we do have are the result of luck or assistance from others, then we'd feel more obligated to pay that luck and opportunity forward to others. It's a doctrine built on selfishness that turns everything in our lives into a zero-sum game, where there are only winners and losers.

Real life doesn't work like that.

Sports matches and skill contests have winners and losers because they're competing for a single object or trophy. In real life, we work to establish comfort and to have some measure of wealth to sustain us. Wealth and comfort aren't a single resource; there's not a fixed amount of comfort or sustainability in the world. Our self-worth and our personal value aren't measured by who has some made-up trophy. Regular life doesn't consist of constant contests where we must defeat and put down someone else in order to get something for ourselves. Parents don't have to suffer for their children to have a better life; friends don't have to beat each other in order to succeed.

Life is not a zero-sum game.

But America is slowly becoming a country where the zero-sum lifestyle is becoming the norm. Large corporations have eroded the voice of the average American to the point where whomever is elected to office has already been paid huge sums of money to continue propagating this zero-sum game of winners and losers. Even our country's largest religious population has been indoctrinated with this "prosperity doctrine" that equivocates wealth with righteousness and poverty with some inherent immorality. The most popular programming on television consists of taking real people and placing them in situations where they must stab each other in the back while fighting over the scraps of wealth from the enormous studios that benefit from the reality television. The very concept of a win-win proposition has nearly been eradicated from all of our daily programming, our religious teaching, our cultural consciousness, and our democratic processes.

Many of the folks I've met at the Occupy Dallas group are hard-working, they've tried over and over to do the right things, and have repeatedly done what they've been told is expected of them over the years to succeed. Yet, like millions of people in America, all they've been given in return is predatory lending, unbalanced debt, layoffs to outsource overseas, and job losses to pay for the unreasonable bonuses of the top one percent out there. If America is experiencing a recession, and if it's a time where we must all tighten our belts to make it through the tough times, then why are only the poorest and least wealthy in the country the ones who are making less and less money (while the top is making record profit)? Why do we have soldiers that put their lives on the line for the past 6, 10, or 12 years coming out of the service to shrugs and "sorry, can't help you" from America's vaunted "job creators"? Why have the wages of the vast majority of Americans remained flat (or dropped) over the last 30 years, while the top 20% in this country have had their wages increase four times over? Why do corporations now enjoy all the rights and privileges of people in the USA, while having to bear none of the responsibilities that us non-corporation people are required to bear? These are the important questions being asked by the Occupy Dallas group and the many Occupy movement groups throughout the United States-- why have the only responses to these questions been "get a job"?

I have a job and I support the Occupation. What do those critics have to say to me?