Occupy the Schools

I found the Occupy Wall Street movement the most interesting thing about 2011, even though it disappointed me.  It disappointed me because I thought that they would make people aware of the criminal activity in our financial system and the inequality of opportunity that now pervades our society.  Instead, the people who occupied Wall Street and the financial centers of other cities did little more than display a sense of entitlement.

By focusing on the one percent of Americans who have more wealth than the 99 percent of the rest of us, members of the Occupy Wall Street movement failed to convince the rest of us that we need to make profound changes in our financial system and our government in order to restore the equality of opportunity that the authors of the United States Constitution had in mind.  Inequality of income is just a symptom of inequality of opportunity.  Many of us do not have an issue with others having enormous wealth, unless they acquired that wealth by cheating the rest of us.  Occupy Wall Street has said little or nothing about lax enforcement of insider trading laws, and they have said little or nothing about the financial geniuses who rigged the system so that it is harder to tell the difference between investment and speculation.

I thought the Occupy Wall Street movement would try to put pressure on the government to prosecute those who were responsible for the banks having to be bailed out by the government, or at least try to get them fired.  One of my Facebook friends claims that the banks failed because they were forced by the government to give home loans to people who could not pay back the loans.  Neither Occupy Wall Street nor the mass media has addressed this issue.  No one has addressed how the public educational system no longer provides access to opportunity as it once did.  A person who graduates from high school in a wealthy school district has many more college and career opportunities than a person who graduates from high school in a poor school district.  It should not matter whether a person graduates from a rich school or a poor school, but it does.

Occupy Wall Street was correct in protesting on Wall Street instead of protesting at the United States Capitol, because the real power is on Wall Street.  However, it is futile to tell Wall Street that they have too much money and that they should share it with the rest of us.  To bring about change, they need to do much more than complain about how some people have more money than others.  They need to remember that if all of the wealth in America were to be fairly distributed around the world, all Americans would have much less than we do now.  They need to come up with an idea to restructure the tax code so that all schools are equally funded.  If we all receive the same educational opportunities, economic inequalities will be less severe.