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People keep asking, ‘What do they want?’

It isn’t a matter of what we want. It’s a matter of what we need.

What we need is a practical government that provides for the survival of its people. It’s simple, obvious and we don’t have it.

We the people of these United States demand a more equitable union. We are the poor, the tired, the disenfranchised masses, and we are crying out for hope. Not just hope for a better tomorrow, hope for any tomorrow at all. We need certainty that there will be a day after today, a guarantee that dawn will come again, a promise that the darkness now surrounding us will end. We need our jobs back, we need the people who took everything from us to be punished, and we need our leaders to protect us and make sure this never happens again. We need a fair chance at life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We need our future back.

Ours has never been a perfect union, but we survived for over two hundred years with almost constant growth and expansion, and only now is that in doubt, only now has our momentum come to a halt and we see ourselves sliding backward. We survived war, espionage, and terrorists. What brought us to our knees was the boundless greed of a handful of our own citizens. We were strong because we had a national dream, a unified vision of the life we all wanted a part of and felt entitled to. A house, a spouse, a job some kids and a car. It wasn’t much to ask for, and in the modern world, it’s just barely enough to survive. For some reason, our leaders don’t think we deserve it anymore. We had factories and jobs, until our leaders sent the jobs and the factories to other nations. Not because they needed to do so, but because it was slightly more profitable. We had houses and families, until our leaders thought it would be better if they took our houses and sold them to other people. But they didn’t just take some of our houses, they took all the houses, and when they wanted to sell them to other people, we were the only people left, and we were broke….and then, so were they. They took everything we had and gambled it on a fools wager and lost, and they hated us for it. So they took more, they raised our taxes. No home and no job, and now if you are lucky enough to find work, our leaders take even more than they did before….but somehow the rich are getting taxed even less. When all was lost, we had one thing left: HOPE. We have always been a nation of optimists and dreamers, and even when we had nothing left, we still believed in the future. And they took that from us too. The jobs aren’t leaving, they left. They are not coming back. Why? They said so. We can’t depend on social security when we get old because it’s leaving and not coming back. Why? They said so.  We are billions of dollars in debt to our own government for student loans that gave us worthless degrees and wasted years of our lives. Why? You know why.

This is no longer a dog-eat-dog world, this is now a world where there is one big dog eating all the rest of us, and we either form a pack or die. The system is officially and formally rigged against us. The show is over and the pretending is done. The politicians in our society aren’t even pretending to talk to us anymore. They fight each other for power and argue over meaningless details that only matter to them and the few powerful people they represent. Our leaders are petty, childish oligarchs that wouldn’t care whether we lived or died except to wonder which would make them more money.

We now rebel against these robber barons, these princes of theft, because it wasn’t enough for them to have a little more than the rest of us, or even a lot more, they had to have everything, everything for themselves. When we had nothing left to take, they didn’t just throw us away, they cast us out with revulsion and scorn. We had been ransacked, pillaged and burned, and they cast the blame on us. After all the victimization, after all the tears and agony, they looked down on us without mercy or pity, and they told us it was our fault.

This is why we are marching and this is why we will not stop.

People are saying that we hate the Capitalism, that we hate the wealthy, and that we hate America. The people saying this are misguided. What we truly hate are things that any rational person hates. We don’t hate Capitalism, we hate greed so powerful it destroys lives and bankrupts nations. We don’t hate the wealthy, we hate it when we see the rich taking from the poor. We don’t hate America, we hate the leaders who have corrupted it.

We do not resent the rich and powerful because they have easy lives. We do not hate them because they own expensive things. We are furious with them because they felt they had to crush us completely to obtain more things. More meaningless wealth, more of everything except compassion for the other citizens of this nation. 

Our society is in chaos because a few of the rich have declared war on all of the poor. It is a one-sided war. The poor have more people, but the rich have literally everything else. And the poor haven’t been fighting back. Until now. It is a war the poor did not want, but it is a war the poor must ultimately win. We don’t need to win to obtain a moral victory, we need to win because our lives literally depend on it. We are cold, we are hungry and we are hopeless. Those in power are happy to wait for us to die. It is up to us to ensure that we survive. We have to take action to save ourselves because no one is coming to save us. We are getting no help. There is no cavalry on the way, and there are no knights in shining armor. There is us and them, that’s it, and only one will make it through this. Who should win? Should it be the 1% who caused the problem? Or the 99% of us that have been saving the day, every day for our entire lives? Who will win? Only people like us can decide.

The hopes and dreams of an entire generation have been sacrificed, not for a great cause, but to give wealth to the already wealthy, to give comfort to the already comfortable, to give a better life to those who already have the best lives of all. We don’t want to destroy the happiness of others, we just want the opportunity to pursue happiness for ourselves. The greatest crime of this century is not that we had our lives ruined, it’s that we had our lives ruined for no reason. We must not allow ourselves to become a ridiculous footnote in history, we can’t let ourselves be known to the ages as the generation that got scammed. We cannot and will not be a lost to posterity. We rise up now, and fight, and make change, and we take our place among the reformers, the radicals and the revolutionaries. We will not fail because we cannot fail. We are not arrogant, we are desperate, desperate and furious and still alive and we cannot stop until we win or die. They will lose, because they still have other options.

We've all been waiting for the right time. It only comes once in a generation. Can you feel it? It's now. It's in New York. It's in LA. It's in Egypt and Libya and The United Kingdom and dozens of other places around thw world. Get up and do something about it before it passes you by, you're only going to get once chance.