Who’s Doing the ‘Occupying’—and Why
The chickens of an entitlement mentality have indeed come home to roost with the unthinking "Occupy" movement.
On October 9, about 500 or so protesters marched from the Federal Reserve Building to The Country Club Plaza to protest something. I am not exactly sure what, and I’m pretty sure they aren’t sure, either. It appears that they were aping the Occupy
Wall Street crowd, whose own members seem to be protesting something that they can never quite seem to agree on.
One local protester, a young woman in a mask, summed up the kind of things that they all seemed upset about:
“We the people are ready to not owe anything to anyone anymore. We work too hard. We get paid too less. The corporations, they take all the greed. We’re left with nothing, except for the dirty, repetitive, grimy work.”
Clarity of thought like that led this young lady to a few ideas as to what could make her and her pals happy:
“We want to go to college for free. We want free health care. We want our veterans to be taken care of. And we want new technologies to benefit the world and all our human brothers. We deserve so much more.”
OK. Well, that should be easy enough. We’ll put in a work order down at City Hall, and we should have those demands taken care of by closing time next Friday. Except for the new technologies, of course, which might take another week or two.
I just wonder how she was able to leave “We want a functioning set of critical-thinking skills” off of her wish list.
Youthful Indiscretion?
We could write this nonsense all off to the empty-headedness of youth, but one look at the crowd reminds us that these youth aren’t all that young. Among the guest speakers, for instance, as listed on a poster for the Oct. 9 event, was the “UMKC Economics Dept.”
Several UMKC professors have been publicly identified as addressing the movement. Although I am happy to see them exercising their right to free speech, I am less happy about the notion that, as a Missouri taxpayer, I am helping to pay for it.
Then, too, as a small-business owner who has to bust his butt to meet payroll every month, I am less than thrilled about what these airheads are teaching our children on our dime. These marches should embarrass the professors. When they take the stage,
they should be shouting, “Go home! Get a job! Pay some taxes! Make a serious contribution to society!”
Say what you will about American corporations, but in the past 120 years or so, they have doubled the life span of the average citizen. They brought to the American home unprecedented luxuries—hot and cold running water, indoor plumbing, electricity, central heating, air conditioning, the telephone, not to mention television and the Internet. These are gifts that almost no one had before the 20th century, and much of the world still doesn’t have today.
Too many of today’s students have no idea how all of this happened or how all of these “new technologies” came to be commonplace. They did not learn it in high school, and they sure as hell have not learned it in an economics class at UMKC.
Ironically, while one branch of UMKC is busy leading its students backwards, the Bloch School of Management is leading the university into the future—or at least trying to, given the disproportionate amount of freight it has to pull. The irony, of course, is that the school is pushing forward with programming that supports its commitment to entrepreneurship, and its broader goal of making Kansas City a bastion of that stripe of capitalism.
Equally ironic, where UMKC is involved, the campus sits across the street from—and frequently collaborates with—the Kauffman Foundation, a community and national treasure in its pursuit of entrepreneurial policy and studies thereof.
What we’re seeing in municipal parks across the nation is the kind of temper tantrum you see in a 2-year-old—just not quite as well-thought-out. We’ve long lamented the creeping nature of the entitlement mentality in this country, but it has reached a tipping point with these people. Bottom line, their message is: “We have some things. You have more. So give us yours.”
It would be easy to dismiss these people as loons, ignore them and go about one’s business. But history has shown us that people, acting with a herd mentality, can foment social stampedes that will produce economic disasters and leave us asking afterwards, “What were they thinking?”
It’s time to start thinking—and acting. Bring out the fire hoses, give these people the bathing they so badly need, clear out the parks and let’s all get back to work. 
Joe Sweeney
Editor-In-Chief & Publisher
JSweeney@IngramsOnLine.com