A Recently Graduated Student with a Bachelor's Degree Writes About Occupy Wall Street

So there's this little event going on that you may have heard of called Occupy Wall Street.

Most of you reading this have just brought up some kind of connotation just by reading those words.  A lot of you, my friends who recently graduated or are still in college, have strong feelings supporting the protests (which extend much farther than just Wall Street).  Some of you may frown upon the protests, if my Facebook home page is to be believed, with all of the cannon fire about the protesters being entitled brats that demand the world be handed to them.

Both sides are pretty militant, and I've really tried my hardest to stay out of that battlefield because I don't like talking about subjects that I have no personal impact on.  I have never been to any Occupy Wherever protests, but that has more to do with the kind of person I am than how I feel about them.  As with most complex issues, I can really relate to both sides of this debate which so many people see as a completely one-sided issue, one way or the other.

I won't dance around the issue here: I do support the efforts of Occupy Wall Street Etc.  I too think the system that we live in has changed a lot faster than we have, and it really shows in the way the world is now.  My generation, these whiny college students who demand a better way of life, has kind of been doomed from the start.  For many of us, our parents fought for us to have a better life (mine included), and encouraged, if not demanded, us to go to college.  I wrote about this a while back in a previous blog post, written in the dark dark days of my unemployment.  If you don't have the time to read the whole post (and I don't blame you), here's the summary: I was (and still am) mad because after being promised that college would lead us to a life of a great career, many of us are left with minimum wage jobs which make no use of the degrees we worked so hard for.  And that's if we are lucky enough to be employed at all.  So many of us have gone to college that the market is flooded with intelligent students like me who aren't really needed; the job market really doesn't have room for us.

This comic is relevant again.  Credit goes to The Trenches. (Click for full size)

Obviously, this is producing a lot of anger with those of us who have had the futures we worked so hard for gone.  We have been told one thing all our life only to find that it was a lie: a college degree means practically nothing when everyone else has them.  To paraphrase from the movie The Incredibles: "When everyone's special, no one is."  We (and by we I mean dissatisfied college students, whether we are protesting or not), have worked incredibly hard for pieces of paper that are not doing what they were supposed to.

HAVING SAID ALL OF THAT.  I was asked by a good friend a few weeks ago if I wanted to go to Occupy LA.  He asked my the very week I got a job (after five extremely frustrating months of looking), so I said no.  As you may know of me, going to a protest is not my style anyways, and I may have declined even if I could go.

You read earlier that I support the movement of Occupy Wall Street Etc.  The things I have trouble supporting, I think, are the people of Occupy Wall Street Etc., and their methods.  Now that is far from a universal statement.  There are a lot of very strong-minded and opinionated people at Occupy Wall Street Etc., and I'm sure the movement would not be where it is without some level-headedness.  However, there are most definitely people in all of these protests that really do not know what is going on.  People protesting just to protest because they are mad.  And while that may be valid on a small scale, it really just hurts the chances that something good could get done.  This article does a great job of highlighting the people I'm talking about.

What also gets me irritated about the movement is that it is very hard to take seriously sometimes.  I understand that there is a desire to get everybody's voices heard.  That is a very noble desire, indeed.  But how much can you get away with doing that is a question that I'm not sure anyone is looking for an answer to.  This Youtube video shows the main way that Occupy Wherever protests take a crowd consensus: through hand signals.  There's no way to say this without looking like a douche, so I'll just say it: you look like you have very little idea of what is going on when you do that.  It looks ridiculous, it is very (I think overly) politically correct, and you know what you just look like a class of kindergartners when you do that. It brings out the worst in what I see as a movement that I really could respect.


But my biggest problem might be that the lack of organization is really starting to show.  The lack of any kind of date of departure is only going to leave a bad mark on your protests.  A quote from an Occupy LA press release: "As for a time stamp on our departure, there is none. We are resolved to continue our peaceful occupation. As occupiers across America are bravely and against great odds and obstacles exercising the right to have their voices heard in a public forum, we stand in solidarity with our brothers and sisters around this nation and around the globe."


That's very valiant, but hardly realistic.  And hardly a way to earn respect from the people you are trying to get it from.  Because you aren't trying to please the people who support you; we already do.  You need to gain the respect of people that don't or are on the fence.  That's really the only way that you are going to take the momentum you have and turn it into what you're looking for, which is some kind of change.  What kind of change that is, we don't know, because there is no real goal for the protests.  That about sums up the reason you will never see me at one of these things: No goal and no departure date.  There's force there, but it has no direction.  I can't really get behind that.


HAVING SAID ALL OF THAT.  You know the really, really annoying people are in all of this?  Anybody who is on their high horse about this protest.  The smug people who sit on either side (and believe me, both sides have them) and caricaturize the opposition.

This is funny. Humor. Comedy.  This OBVIOUSLY does not represent all of the 1%, but some people have a hard time understanding that.

I have defiled my hard drive by saving these pictures to share them with you.

Some people call this bullshit, some inspiring.  I call it, "Get this crap off my Facebook page."

I think the worst case is when somebody posts one of these pictures with a caption, "Food for thought?" or "Hmmmmm..." as if this is just something that they are casually posting.  If you're going to make your statement, make it without being smug.  Be respectful of your opponent (if you even want to call them that).  99%  of the time, you didn't even think if the slogans or take the pictures you're sharing so much.  The egos on either side of this debate are astounding.

I'm sorry you had to see this.

Occupy Everywhere protesters: Not every business owner is a cartoon supervillain that takes pride in how much you suffer.  Yes, that even includes the big ones.  God, I hate having to type those words.

To those that think all the protesters are whining about nothing: well, if you haven't figured out why that's false, no amount of explaining from me is going to change your mind.  But it is a load of crap.

This isn't about being liberal or a conservative.  This is about ending this "Us vs Them" attitude about an incredibly complex problem that we should be looking for answers to.

If you've stuck it out this far, thank you for reading this.  This is an article written by someone from the generation ahead of mine which discusses the horrible emotions that brought on this whole debacle.  I recommend reading it.  It inspired this blog.

This is Me Being Mad at Society

Despite the whimsical title of this blog, I do try to avoid whining too much.  I don't really like crying out for attention, regardless of what my vague-booking posts may say about me.  But I'm actually going to hop aboard the complain train for a while because I'm mad, and goddammit I have a podcast to get to and I need this out of my system before I record.

So I grew up with a pretty simple plan.  I followed the rules that were set around me.  If I was told, "Do A and you'll get B," I noticed that I got B when I did A.  It's kinda been my go-to rule for things.  Now, there are exceptions to this rule.  When I get spam mail that says I just need to reply with my Social Security Number to claim money from a Nigerian Prince, I have the idea that there's a lie in there somewhere.  The risk is too high for me to do something as stupid as send my SSN to people I don't know.  Basically, after some risk vs. reward assessment, I decided to play by the rules around me and trust in the rewards promised to me by my elders.

This plan worked really well for me, too.  In school, I quickly learned that if I listened to my teachers, I got better grades.  And from elementary school through high school, that was kind of how I measured how I was doing in life.  My grades were what was important to me.  I played sports when I was little, and even got to be my team's closing pitcher in little league, but my grades were what mattered more than anything.  Well, that and the approval of my parents, which came partly from the grades.

My primary motivation was this: if I get good grades, my life will be better.  Now, I should note that I really had very little in the way of a concrete reward.  It was kind of the hopeful fantasy that young children are so ready to have.  Probably like, "You can have an awesome job like being an astronaut or policeman or being an author if you do all your work!"  So that quickly became my goal.  I needed to do what I could in school so I could get a good job and live a successful life.

So let's fast-forward a little bit.  I make it to middle school, where the pressure of OMG COLLEGE starts to pile up.  By now, it's clear that I'm one of those sad students that cares more about getting homework done and getting my scores as high as possible than they do about having a lot of friends or going to parties.  So I'm a clear target for my middle school to give me college prep information.  And that's where the message I've been hearing gets hammered into me more: "If you go to college, you'll get a great job and make lots of money.  Don't worry about the loans; you'll have so much money that they won't even be a problem."

This is more or less what I was like.  The rabbit, not the carrot.

Because that's kind of what we've been hearing as students going to college, right?  That college means we take out loans, but the investment means we'll pay that back and get a lot more money out of it.  But I'm still young and gullible at this point, and it seems to run with my main rule.  Trusted people are telling me this information, so I can believe what they are telling me.

The cynical members of my audience are seeing the break in the chain.

So I made it through high school with the knowledge that if I get into a good college, I am practically set.  I was in all the Honors and AP classes my little college would let me take, and by the end of high school, I had a 4.33 GPA.  I had played football all four years of high school (starting on varsity for three of those years), wrestled for three of them (HDL champ for two of those years), and I was on the track and field team for my senior year.  Basically, if I wasn't going to your college, it was money issues.  Which I knew would happen, because if I didn't get a full ride, I was going to need loans.

So when it came down to it, I applied and got accepted to three schools: CSU Long Beach, Whittier College, and Willamette University.  CSULB was my first choice because most of my friends were going there, and it would be somewhat close to where I lived (Lancaster, CA).  Whittier was actually closer, and had been recruiting me for football.  Now, there was a lot of talk from my father along the lines of, "I can't tell you where to go, but..."  which I kind of knew was coming.  I know it made my dad proud that I was getting recruited for a college football program.  I got the same offer from Willamette.  The weather really drew me to want to go to Oregon, and my friends drew me to Long Beach.  However, I took a trip to Whittier College, and I loved the place.  It was small, it had beautiful architecture, I loved the aesthetics, and it had the ridiculous mascot of the Poets.

Johnny Poet, or as he's known by WC students, Johnny Rapist.

 Financially, I still thought CSULB was the right choice, but my dad convinced me that going to Whittier was a better idea, primarily because of the football program.  I knew the loans would probably run me more in the long run, but "it will be okay, because I'll get a great degree and I'll have an awesome job and I'll make enough money to pay back my loans while living comfortably."

Oh foolish hope.

And here we get to the point of this whole string of story.  After making the Move of Shame back home to San Bernardino, I sit and write this blog from my mom's house.  During my senior year of college, I lived off-campus, making monthly rent payments through the jobs I had earned from school.  I didn't even have Work-Study during that last year because of a cut in our funding, but I managed to get my job back through the extreme generosity of my supervisors in the college's mail room and from my advisor, Charles Eastman.  I didn't play football my senior year because of some decisions to fire my O-line coaches, and if I had played football, I wouldn't have been able to juggle the work, school, and sports to the standards I hold myself to.

For those of you keeping score, I played football for three years of college, worked for three years in a few different departments of the college (and I am thankful for every job I had), and finished my degree with a 3.5 GPA.  I worked my ass off.

So here I sit, quite unemployed, tippity-typing away at this blog.  I wrote the 30 Days of Video Game blog to keep myself writing, and my cousin and I have started a podcast called 8-bit Banter.  Neither of these, though, adds money to my bank account in any way.  I have my Bachelor's in English, but I've run into the best Catch-22 of all: You need experience to get a job, but you can't get experience if you've had no job.  Apparently the three I had at the college don't count for anything to most employers, including the one where I was responsible enough to cover for my supervisors when they could not make it into work.

I've applied to jobs since May when I graduated.  I made it to the final stages of a big opportunity with LA County, but was rejected at the last stage.  I had connections to a store which was right by me during the past summer, but they were worried that I was too qualified for them and that I would just skip out when something better came along.

Click for the full-size image; taken from The Trenches.

And I've really heard nothing.  I've gotten a few "No thank you"s from some of the nicer companies, or just the no-response treatment from most of the other ones.  So far, no job.  I was hoping that I could start saving now to help when my college loans start becoming due in, oh, less than three months now, but alas, this may not be the case.

I want to go on record as saying that this is not the college's fault, nor do I want to demonize employers more than they already are.  It may be my fault for getting a degree in something that isn't a hard science, which I find really respectable, or something that's kind of a buzzword, like the Business Admin degree.  I went and studied what I loved, but it seems like that has been a poor choice on my part so far.  It feels like my ability to write, which people have tried to tell me is a great selling point, is nothing without the right connections.  

I may just be feeling desperate about my current standing, but it feels like I have been lied to on many fronts.  The job market isn't what we predicted it would be.  There are more students than me, I am sure, that feel this way.  We were promised that if we were diligent, and worked our asses off in school, we would be in a great place to get a great job.  A lot of us were promised something.  We held up our end of the bargain, and our reward was never delivered.  Like I said, I'm having a hard time getting a small, regular job, because employers are afraid I'm going to jump ship at my first opportunity.  And I really can't blame them.

So my request is simple: pass this on.  Consider this the only thing I've really asked to have re-posted by you, my readers, family, and friends.  Not for a popularity-contest sort of thing, but because if anyone feels like crap because they worked their ass off for a piece of paper that hasn't done anything for them, I want them to keep up hope.  But importantly, I want to spread the message that things are different than we were told.  You can't count on being so intelligent that you'll impress employers into knowing that you're a great addition to their workforce.  In fact, you can't really count on anything.  We're told to go to college because it's what you're supposed to do.  But if you go in just because you've been told to, you might not be prepared for what's coming after that.  Send this to anyone who might need this message.

Also, if you repost this enough, I might get noticed by an employer who is impressed with my writing skills and who wants to offer me a job.  All job-related e-mails should be sent to freddiemalcomb@gmail.com.