A counterprotest...what do you think?

[pegkerr]

Inevitably, there would be a counter to the blog that has fascinated me so much, the tumbler We Are the 99 percent.

It's called We Are the 53 percent. Apparently, the 53% is the percentage of Americans who pay federal taxes.

Mission statement, I guess, from the first post:

We, the 53% of income-earners who pay taxes, hereby refuse to bitch about it. We’re happy to make a living. Just because we could whine about stuff doesn’t mean we will. That is all.

Further explanation from the person who started it here. I first learned about it by stumbling across this description:

We Are the 53 percent was launched in response to the Occupy Wall Street's We Are the 99 percent tumblr site (background on We Are The 53% here). Spend time at both sites and you will notice a difference. We Are The 99% is filled with sad-faced people looking for someone else (government?) to solve their problems. We Are The 53% positively bristles with stories of people who came to this country, struggled, failed, failed again and maybe succeeded. We Are The 53% is a great idea, politics aside. Go there and be inspired.

I did a little more surfing and ran across this:

The 53% is a group of responsible young people organizing across the country. However, this group is not camping out in parks around the country and demanding the entire capitalist system be destroyed. These men and women have jobs (most of them work at more than one job in order to make ends meet), but they are talking about attending the Minneapolis Occupy Wall St. protest scheduled for today – Friday, October 7th.

And so forth, and so on. Take a look at that link, and you'll get the general drift: that the Wall Street protesters are ungrateful, lazy layabouts too helpless to do anything but whine that the government should fix everything.

I shouldn't let stuff like this get under my skin. But I can't help it. Maybe it was my upbringing (partly religious) that raised me with the voice ringing in my ears 'don't be a whiner.' That's an accusation that absolutely pushes my buttons (and part of the reason, perhaps, that I have been frequently told that I too often stick with a no win situation, simply because I can't bear being thought of as a quitter). And it's one accusation, a method of reframing, that the opponents of the Occupy Together movement is flinging around with a vengeance. Look at the smugness there, both at the tumbler blog itself and the commentary on it, the conviction of moral superiority: Life may knock us down but we get up and fight because we're tough enough and patriotic enough to take what comes to us and get up and keep fighting. Unlike you lazy whining welfare commie hippies.

It infuriates me. It's an accusation that the people who have joined the occupy protest are in the situation they're in only because they're weak. They're quitters. They're losers. It's absolutely blaming the poor for being poor. Or the middle class for getting poorer.

It's bad enough when millionaire senators do it. But when other people who are also struggling level such accusations, sneering at people who are hurting because they've dealt with cancer, foreclosure, devastating medical costs, etc., it's just...just galling.

(Or is it just me? Are you able to let stuff like this roll off your back?)

Edited to add: Now would also be a good time to point to this post, which I bookmarked years ago.

Comments

[vacillating]

From where I'm sitting, on the other side of the pond, the 53% sound like members of the 99% who either don't yet know how bad it is or are clinging to their martyr positions. Posting, in public, 'life sucks for me too but I'm not complaining - look at me not complaining' tends to read like an attempt to maintain slight privilege in a known system over the risk of... whatever the Occupy movement might produce.

This may be totally off-base; I could have missed a vital detail since I'm not inside the American political context. It's just my initial reading.

Top 1% Counter Protest

[(Anonymous)]

There are other counter protests out there, for example at http://toponepercentcanada.wordpress.com/2011/10/24/occupy-toronto-counter-protest/. The top 1% strike back with such pithy sayings as "Not all rich people are greedy assholes earning their wealth on the backs of the poor, although I’ll admit this is correct in my particular case"