Editor, The News:
Re: Protestors preparing to Occupy Maple Ridge (The News, Oct. 21)
It’s sad that so many do not understand that regardless of your age, that even if you make a six-figure income and pay your taxes, that you really are not part of the one per cent.
Your ego may not like it very much, but you are really just part of the 99 per cent like the rest of us.
The scale used is a lot like the Mohs scale of mineral hardness. The Mohs scale is made up of whichever one mineral that is hard enough to scratch the other, going in order from softest to hardest. It starts with talc at No. 1 and ends with diamond at No. 10.
There is a vast difference in hardness between diamonds and No. 9, corundum, and all the other minerals down to talc. It’s not an even scale.
That’s how it is with our population and its distribution of wealth.
I even like the analogy of a diamond being able to scratch and ruin all the other minerals.
Because your six-figure income still buffers you from what others who struggle on so much less are facing, you may be oblivious to what’s going on with Occupy Vancouver, which is unfortunate because it really is all around you. It will get around to you, too. Hopefully, if people wake up, it won’t need to come to that for everyone.
Perhaps reading the book Retirement Heist: How Companies Plunder and Profit from the Nest Eggs of American Workers’, by Ellen E. Schultz, will at least start to help explain to you, in part, who the one per cent really are and what the Occupy movement is about.
It’s been pretty obvious that our young have been getting a raw deal. You may have adult children still living at home with you not able to afford to move out on their own. With the lack of decent jobs, of the kind one can build a life with, the government’s allowing of the dismantling of employment rules, the low minimum wage, high cost of education, putting our young in debt with little chance of being able to crawl out from under it. We’ve been told a lot of lies. Our young are in despair.
In the past 30 years, our lives have been pilfered to pillaged away from us while we’ve been distracted by, among other things, celebrity gossip. Who knows what the real truth is around and about every world crisis?
Can we trust the media if it’s owned by someone who could profit from lying to us?
The Occupy movement is about a lot of things. It’s about the laughing CEO who get’s the $50 million retirement bonus while hundreds of thousands of people who worked their whole lives under him are told there is not enough money to pay for their retirement incomes and will then need to share the $30 million or so left after the CEO’s retirement bonus was basically scooped off the top.
This trend of stealing from the many, including from people’s futures, to give excessive wages and bonuses to the few is going on in businesses and governments all over.
For instance, what’s with the bonuses we keep hearing are being given out in our Crown corporations?
Bonuses are handed out on top of decent wages. Most of us don’t get big bonuses for doing a job we are already being paid to do. What’s with that?
If you keep your ears and eyes open you will realize it’s going on here in Canada, as well. It’s been made legal.
Wake up.
Gail Neufeld
Maple Ridge