We Are the 99%

Go Occupy Movement! It's so awful to be in the 99 percent.

I'm in the 99 percent.

Several years ago, our government gave us—flat out handed us—about $150,000 we didn't have, just so Matt could go to medical school. Tuition stunk (thanks CO voters with your dumb Taxpayer Bill of Rights that accidentally bankrupted higher education—oops!) and you can't earn a living while you're a medical student, so we had no hope of starting medical school without serious financial help. We should have scrimped and saved for years and years (and years!) to start on Matt's dream of becoming a doctor, but instead...money just landed in our pockets.

Unfortunately...we have to pay at back! Plus interest that is accruing all these years while we still aren't making much money. Can you believe it? The gall! Handing us money we could have never hoped to accrue on our own, and then expecting us to [gasp!] pay it back? Corrupt, I tell you. Corrupt. Thank you, Occupy Movement, for pointing out that the government sucks for making us pay back money they gave us—thank you for suggesting a mass boycott of loan repayment. "If millions of people refuse to pay, they'll get the message." Oh yes they will.

So, here we are.... Like many of the occupiers, we are saddled with loans, overworked, and underpaid. Paying our dues. (Oh wait.... The occupiers aren't actually overworked, because they don't work at all. Boo hoo hoo, I kept applying for jobs—10 in the last two years!—and I couldn't get one. Boo hoo hoo.)

We are the 99 percent.

We have two cars.

(Did you know in the U.S. there are more cars than drivers? We have an average of more than one car per driving American.)

We have two cell phones. This actually puts us in a stinky minority of the already-stinky 99%, since the average American has more than one cell phone. (There are more active cell phones in the United States than the total population. Even babies? More cell phones per family than there are people...? Wow!)

It is with a certain amount of embarrassment that I admit we have two computers, two iPhones, and an iPad. (The average American will spend over $300 on Apple products this year.)

We have so much stinking money that we even have a tent, and the luxury to go pitch it in the middle of town if we wanted. We could even network with people on our iPhones about the injustices of our 99% position.

I came across an article yesterday about kids in Mali who work in gold mines because their families can't afford to send them to school. (Oh, did I mention that Seth goes to school for free? Awesome teacher, too. We walk to school every day—kids in the double stroller, me with my special walking shoes. Seth brings home books from the library, plays with PE equipment, goes to a computer lab and a music class....) These kids in Mali burn up their lungs with the mercury gas they torch off of the gold (their mothers also help burn off mercury in their yards), or spend long days helping to bring stuff to the surface that was mined deep underground. When they're done, they may or may not get paid. (They also may or may not suffocate underground from toxic gas.) If they are paid, it is sometimes in bags of dirt, with the hope that something of value will be in it.

The most remarkable thing about this story was how unremarkable it was. Much of the world lives with such realities. Most of it, in fact.

Did I say that, with the average American, or even the average poverty-stricken American, we are the 99 percent?

I'm sorry. I meant to say: 99th percentile.