I am one of the 99 percent, yet I’m not.
The 99 percent, as you’ve no doubt heard, is a rallying cry of the Occupy Wall Street protesters and their movement in general. It refers to the disparity of wealth between the wealthy 1 percent and the suffering 99 percent, as well as the United States Congress’ favoring of the wealthy because of monetary contributions.
For me, it’s a rather interesting conflict of sorts that I find myself in.
I was raised in a fairly well-off middle-class household. We had insurance coverage across the board. My brother and I went to the local schools and received very good educations. We had savings plans for college. Overall, we didn’t have to be too concerned about money, but there was plenty to worry about and to save for.
I didn’t enter the workforce until the summer of my sophomore year of college. In prior years, I attended day camps for six summers, sleepaway camps for three and extracurricular/educational camps for two. You could say that makes me privileged, but my parents wanted me to have a good childhood, even though not everyone can afford it.
After one summer of not having a job, I’ve had a job with the town camp system for the last three summers. While I strove for an internship this past summer, nothing came through, but that’s the state of the market these days.
I wrote at the start of the semester that I didn’t know what I wanted to do upon my graduation in May. I still don’t.
Yes, grad school is a possibility, but so is employment, and I’m still up in the air. As I alluded to, the job market isn’t doing so well. Unemployment is 9.1 percent and more than 14 million Americans are unemployed.
Heads of corporations who aren’t showing much positive turnaround are getting unnecessarily large bonuses for seemingly doing nothing while their lower-level employees who are showing such incentive are getting pink-slipped with shoddy severance packages. What about corporation higher-ups who are given the boot and float down on golden parachutes? If my knowledge of the periodic table is correct, shouldn’t they be plummeting?
Even if I’m doing OK, I don’t want to rely on my parents to get by after graduating. I want to get my own job and make my way in the world, even if it means fighting unemployment. Just because I currently don’t have a job and am not rich doesn’t mean I should blame myself, as Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain suggests.
No, I’m not one of the millions without health coverage, relying on food stamps with an inflated mortgage. But that doesn’t mean I will have something full time once I’m out of college. That doesn’t mean I can’t identify and join in solidarity with the 99 percent. I am the 99 percent.