
Originally Posted by
elpolloloco
It may be a joke to you, but not to others. There's a lot of fucked up shit in this country and there is plenty of reason to be angry. Irresponsible people caused a lot of mess with foreclosures but irresponsible banks had a lot to do with it to, yet they get 10's of billions in bailouts. They may not have done anything illegal, but to say they didn't do anything unethical is outrageous. We blew so much money on Iraq when the war was based on a lie and we should have been focusing on Afghanistan. The more you sit back, the more the government tries to inject religion into your laws. The more they try to tax you and create a system of social engineering. If you give the government and inch, it will indeed take that inch from you and see how much more of your freedom you can scoop up. It isn't a system wide conspiracy usually, as much as it is a minority of people with a lot of power power (be it political power or economic power) will do what they can to make the world better for only themselves. Laws are made and broken based on how much money an interest group throws as it. We print more and more money to back up more and more debt causing inflation which is basically a tax on EVERYONE. It's been like that for a while, yes, but when do you decide enough is enough?
America is no NAZI germany, you're right about that. But Nazi Germany wasn't Nazy Germany 20 years prior to WWII. Russia's communist revolution didn't turn the country into a nightmare for human rights overnight. Stalin wouldn't have been able to order troops to literally starve 2 million people to death if years of people hadn't been subjected to years of propaganda that the state is more important that human rights. That shit happens gradually and if you think you see the tides of something unjust coming in, WHY NOT try to bring attention to it rather than wait until there's someone on your doorstep and then you're actually FORCED to violence? Isn't it better to stop what you perceive to be the makings of a fascist government and try to bring attention to it early rather than wait until it's too late?
I feel the same way you do largely about the protestors, but not every one of them are a bunch of middle class whiners. Plenty of them have real reason to be fed up. What good is having free speech if you're not allowed to use it when you think there is a cause for it?
When you get a large group of people together, and the larger it gets, the more "idiots" you've obviously going to get that needed to be "babysat" but you shouldn't make a generalization about 95% of a group based on 5% of them being morons. That's life. There is always going to be a group of morons tagging along, bringing more attention to themselves than to the message the responsible people are trying to bring to light.
People see the 99% thing and assume people are just pissed that the rich are getting richer. Deep down that's not what people are concerned about. That's just a symptom of the real problem that people are protesting about: An unbalanced amount of influence on the government by the rich.