In a recent podcast comedian and celebrity personality Adam Corolla railed against the Occupy Movement generation as America’s new “fucking self-entitled monsters” who “think the world owes them a living.” Corolla bases his insults on the development and creation of a youth culture in America which leaves recent college graduates unprepared for the real world, sets up unrealistic expectations, and rewards the “losers” just for trying.
Corolla has a point. A book entitled Generation Me written by psychology professor Jean Twenge does a far better job of elucidating this trend and understanding it’s manifestations than Corolla’s crass bullying, but his attack and extrapolation that the Occupy Movement is simply about young people “throwing shit at another person’s car” is pervasively misguided.
The conservative breakdown of the Occupy Movement uses a simple formula to discredit protesters and follows a single trajectory, “If you do not have a job and you are not financially secure, it is your own fault. Do not blame others for your own shortcomings.” What this argument fails to grasp is that there are systemic issues at play that go far beyond a single person’s or single group’s shortcomings.
Take for example this graph from The Atlantic. In it you can see some stark statistics about the rate of unemployment in Eurozone countries such as Greece and Spain. Both these countries are facing unemployment levels hovering near 20%. In Spain nearly 50% of youth under 25 are unemployed. In case Adam Corolla wasn’t aware, tens of thousands of people took part in Occupy Madrid protests in Puerta del Sol Square over the past weeks. This is NOT just an American movement.
So does that mean that nearly half of Spain’s youth are self-entitled monsters who don’t want to work and would rather scream and whine than get a job? As much as I hate self-entitled rich kids, I cannot bring myself to believe that every other Spanish person is simply not competitive or not good enough to survive. In fact it is categorically untrue as I have met many young Spanish people, fleeing the economic turmoil in their homeland, who have found productive and financially secure employment in Beijing.
These kinds of generalizations are dangerous because they follow the same logic that dehumanizes minorities as being uneducated criminals who have only themselves to blame for their economic woes. It’s based on crude stereotypes that may apply to some, but are utterly irreconcilable with reality.
One point I will cede to Mr. Corolla is that capitalism is the “best system” we have, but it is far from fair. And when free markets require regulation, there needs to be someone there to correct its failures. What the Occupy Movement is fighting for is a level playing field, not equality of results. Let the wealthy CEOs have their Bentleys, but don’t let them gamble with the rest of America (and the world’s) money and then bail them out when they go belly up.
