“The freedom to
think is encroached upon by the encumbrances of money”~Vijay Prashad
I am so proud that
my generation is taking its first steps in standing up for humanity by peacefully
protesting against our world’s most prominent problem: corporate greed. The Occupy Wall Street movement is a multifaceted
protest with no true agenda other than purely confronting corporate crimes
against humanity. It is intriguing how
not having an actual agenda for a specific change essentially strengthens the
protest. By thinking outside of the box
and having no plan and no head creates a situation where the opponents (the
corporations that are in bed with the politicians) have no idea of what is
going on, and therefore cannot come up with a cunning scheme to counteract the
mission of the people.
Thousands of young,
hardworking citizens of nearly every state and many countries throughout the
world are taking it upon themselves to make a visible statement to
society. Yet for some reason, the
sidewalks in front of Hawaii’s banks and big corporations seem to remain the
same with no sign of opposition. How can
this be when the state of Hawaii’s public education system is one of the worst
in the nation? How can this be when so
many people are forced out of their homes during foreclosure? The middle class in Hawaii is certainly not
becoming more empowered in the job force while their already high cost of
living is only increasing at an especially high rate. Perhaps the reason for Hawaii’s inactivity
when it comes to this particular movement is that the state is so small. Honolulu is a city that feels like a small
town. Everyone knows everyone. If you protest, there is a chance that you
could be standing outside of your auntie’s office (a place that provides her
with the most reasonable job in town) and that your uncle is the cop that
monitors the protest. Perhaps this is
only a small part of the reason why Hawaii hasn’t joined the protest against
greed.
The “Occupy”
movements across the world are multifaceted, taking on an array of issues from the
unfair foreclosures of thousands of people’s homes, banks being rewarded
billions of dollars in tax breaks, and the various forms of corporate
greed. In Boston, the movement took on
America’s education system and the tremendous debt it creates for young people
struggling to find jobs. Student debt in
America is now over $1 trillion. The
cost of college is a huge deterrent that keeps great minds and people with
determination from even entering the classroom in the first place. Because of this, a growing number of high
school graduates are turning to vocational and trade education. In Vijay Prashad’s article, The Closing of
the American Mind, he quotes John Dewey who states that when vocational
education begins to dominate the curriculum, “…“education would becomes an
instrument of perpetuating unchanged the existing industrial order of society,
instead of operating as a means of transformation.” Dewey goes onto argue that education founded
primarily on the simple act of learning a monotonous trades and skill is
“illiberal and immoral [because the graduates] do what they do, not freely and
intelligently, but for the sake of the wage earned.”
What is even worse than the deterrence created by the high price
of tuition, is the amount of brilliant, driven students that have no choice but
to quit college because they can no longer afford to finish their degree. Even though, these students work full time
jobs and have parents with full time jobs, they cannot find someone to take out
a second mortgage on their home or cosign on a high interest loan so they can
at least finish the job they already started.
More and more students are left without a degree and tens of thousands
of dollars in debt from a few successful semesters in college.
Prashad states noteworthy facts that put the US’s approach to
funding higher education into perspective when her states how many equally
developed and even less developed countries fund between 70 and 90 percent of
students’ college costs. These countries
range from Hungary to Mexico to Turkey to Ireland. Prashad goes onto emphasize the
straightforward comparative analysis that shows what the American government
gives priority:
" The tuition and fees to all public
institutions of higher education in the United States
is somewhere in the ballpark of $25 billion (according to the Labor Institute). That is a small proportion of the
cost of the wars ($7.6 trillion since 9/11)
and of corporate tax breaks (of which, deferral on foreign income is by itself $1 trillion). The cost of higher
education is a fraction of the $1.35 trillion to $3 trillion, which is range of the cost of the Bush and
Obama tax cuts. "
“The world holds
enough for everyone’s NEED, but not enough for everyone’s GREED.”
~Gandhi
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