I am the 99%! Which is a totally egregious statement. I am the 99% of what? One person can't be 99% of anything. You'd have to be >=50% of something, unless you think you're better than other people.
Do you, you tent-livers in city parks across the country? Do you?
My apartment got broken into the other day. Of the things they stole, the one I'm most upset about is this Twins jersey I bought last year. Sure, they stole money from both me and my roommate, and the jersey wasn't even the highest valued item they took (my trumpet, north of $1k on that sucker). Instead, it was this jersey. Don't get me wrong, it was expensive and that's definitely part of the reason I'm pissed. But despite the fact that all Americans should strive to be a little less materialistic, it was one of my prized possessions. I splurged to get the best kind, an official Majestic gameday jersey. It was a Twins home standard, the blue pinstripes, the logo in its customary arc across the middle of the jersey.
For those of who know me at least a little bit, you know I'm a pretty big baseball nut. This was my first (and so far only) trip to Target Field, and it was the inaugural year of the new stadium. Lauren took me as a birthday present and it was an awesome trip. We went up over a weekend and were gonna see two games, as we'd miss the Friday one while traveling up. Lucky for us, the Friday game got rained out, and they played a day-night doubleheader on Saturday -- perfect. The weather went from Minnesota cold to Minnesota perfect, and in the night game, got to see the return of the man who's Jersey I purchased - Mr. Joseph Mauer.
One thing I want to point out is that the jersey above is incomplete. One of the parts of it that I was most pleased with were the patches on each arm. On one side you had the patch for the first year of Target Field, a pretty big deal. The Twins had obviously played in the shithole known as the Metrodome for over two decades, and played in Metropolitan stadium before (which you can only imagine how crappy that must have been if they decided to leave it and go to the Dome).
On the other arm was a patch for the 50th anniversary of the Twins. While the club wasn't formed in Minneapolis (they moved from D.C. where they were the Washington Senators), it was the 50th year of Minnesotan professional baseball.
All in all, I thought it was a cool jersey, Mauer obviously is a solid choice for the player name (although some are starting to lose faith...), and I was excited to be able to purchase this awesome memento from my trip to the stadium. And mostly I was excited to have this [very expensive] piece of memorabilia.
I thought one day I'd wear it to a World Series game where the Twins were playing, maybe even see a victory. Maybe Mauer would get inducted to the HOF and it would be worth about $2 extra from that day forward. Maybe my kid would become a Twins fan and I could hand it down.
But no, some motherfucker decided that they wanted to obtain little pieces of paper with pictures of the presidents by coming through my bedroom window and perusing the items of my apartment like they were at Target.
The interesting part? They left the computers, TVs, Xbox... all the electronics stayed (save for some Xbox games and my iPod touch that doesn't work). They just took that other shit.
What I'm most pissed about is the lack of respect. And it's not like this is anything new, people have been getting robbed ever since a cave man wanted the other cave man's tennis racket.
And I know I'm not special. Millions of people have been robbed besides me, many less severely, and many in much more terrible ways. I'm not writing this to say I feel sorry for myself but that I just get upset when people are so disrespectful about fellow people in the country. I'm not the most hardworking person in the world (unless you're a prospective employer reading this blog, in which case, I am), but I did work hard to make money to pay for my stuff. And obviously the person(s) who came into my apartment didn't do shit except take stuff and sell it. That's bullshit. Obviously, it's illegal, but it's so easy to get away with that there's hardly any deterrent. It's like, what can you do to indoctrinate people against stealing from other people? You could ingrain it into people A Clockwork Orange-style, but then someone will indubitably figure out that since no one expects anyone to steal anything, they can go ahead and steal shit and have more wealth than anyone without doing any of the work. It's kind of like The Invention of Lying.
But I think this stems more from capitalist society. A true a capitalist, an absolutely idealist capitalist (which doesn't really exist, mind you) would congratulate this person for their self-reliant nature and huge nads they displayed by going into someone else's home. Good job, they'd say, you did the hard work you needed to do in order to make your life better. Their educational investment was the experience gained from robbing previous homes. The price they paid was the gall they had to build up to go into these homes, and their willingness to risk breaking the law. They paid their dues, and this is their reward. In perfect capitalism, it works.
Obviously mostly no one respectable is going to condone this kind of behavior. Still, we have this little nugget from the original Wall Street : "Gordon Gekko: The richest one percent of this country owns half our country's wealth, five trillion dollars. One third of that comes from hard work, two thirds comes from inheritance, interest on interest accumulating to widows and idiot sons and what I do, stock and real estate speculation. It's bullshit. You got ninety percent of the American public out there with little or no net worth. I create nothing. I own. We make the rules, pal. The news, war, peace, famine, upheaval, the price per paper clip. We pick that rabbit out of the hat while everybody sits out there wondering how the hell we did it. Now you're not naive enough to think we're living in a democracy, are you buddy? It's the free market. And you're a part of it. You've got that killer instinct. Stick around pal, I've still got a lot to teach you. "
Isn't this just another way for people to blindly take advantage of you while you're trying to make a respectable living?
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