Lazy Bums

About the Occupiers I hear "They're just being lazy bums sitting around and doing nothing but complaining."  Please let me explain.

Other than life itself, time is the most valued possession of every human being  on this earth. The harshest way we punish guilty criminals is by taking from them their time. We make them waste it in prison, or we take all they'll ever have by ending their lives. We also value our comfort quite highly, and neither sleeping out of doors in tents, nor being pepper sprayed are comfortable.

So if a person sacrifices both their time and comfort for a cause, they are sacrificing considerably.  And when large numbers of people feel they have valid reasons to make personal sacrifice, disagreeing with their reasons may be acceptable, but ignoring or belittling the cause they are sacrificing to champion is an insult; one we should afford nobody.

We know that a recent, successful revolution in the Middle East was sparked by a college graduate who poured gasoline over himself in the town square and lit a match. Why? Because conditions were such that he and many other college graduates in his country were barely able to eke out the most meager of livings. He sacrificed all the time he had left on Earth.

A large percentage of the thousands of Occupiers in cities around the world are recent college graduates, heavily in debt and unable to find work, or students still in college already deeply in debt and facing prohibitive tuition raises. They are also our children and our neighbor's children, our brothers and  sisters, our nieces and nephews, our cousins and our grandchildren. Right now they are out there sacrificing their time and comfort. Can we afford to be so foolish as to stand by and require them to sacrifice more than their time and comfort -- their  lives -- before making a serious attempt to understand and redress their grievances?   

Greg Schindler