Trustafarian self-hatred

Are you by any chance trying to summarize your dissertation for several audiences, in several different formats, and finding yourself taking "breaks" to do reading for your dissertation, which seems like great, carefree fun by comparison? Looking for something genuinely procrastinatory? Look no further. Occupy Wall Street is not just the 99%. The 1% have, as the Daily Mail sneered, joined in. Via two different Facebookers' links, one endorsing it, one half-mocking.

My impressions:

-Of course it's possible to protest in solidarity against an injustice from which you, personally, benefit. Men can be feminists, whites anti-racists, straights for same-sex marriage (from which straights don't lose, precisely, except insofar as heterosexual privilege is diminished). But something feels off about the approach. Is it that the signs look an awful lot like beggars' signs, even if they're ostensibly the kind of sign one would hold up at a protest? That this, combined with street-urchin-chic, makes it seem like it's about rich kids playing at poor, even if that's not what's going on? Maybe someone behind the scenes could have instructed them to dress up for these photos, like when they do the interview segments on the "Real Housewives" and all of a sudden every woman is all modern-day Marie Antoinette'd-out.

-I'm somewhat more convinced by the self-maders asking to be taxed more than by those who were born into wealth, buy their clothes at thrift stores, have no idea what it's like to actually need money (and not even just in the poverty sense, also in the more quotidian I-must-work-or-else-no-income one), and feel ashamed at the unfairness of life, from which they've passively benefitted. The adage (is it indeed an adage?) about how people who say they don't care about money have always had it by the bucket-full makes it hard to care what children of immense financial privilege think about the possibility of higher taxes. Are they even aware that they pay taxes? Aren't teams of money-managers and accountants handling this for them?

-There's also something about the whole thing that reminds me very much of the nine years I spent at private school. There was, first off, the sense of relative poverty (Grew up solidly upper-middle-class? You probably did not find $3 million waiting for you when you turned 21. Or 22...), but this, whatever.  It's more that the super-rich have - as I remember from elementary and middle school, and as this reminds - a tendency to think of everything other than their own situations as tragic. Anyone who's ever had money concerns at all, which is to say anyone who works for a living, might as well be presented by a teary Sally Struthers. This tendency might look like a harsh critique of capitalism, but it's not that. It's more like a failure to understand that while there is such a thing as dire poverty, people who are merely not rich are not crying themselves to sleep about it every night. The middle classes might not be as robust as they once were, but there are Americans outside the 1% who do indeed have health insurance. (Often crappy health insurance, but anyway.) Sometimes people who are not millionaires even do things like buy tinted moisturizer at Sephora only to bring it home and not know quite what to do with it.

-There's quite a bit of confidence among these 1%ers that they will never be anything but comfortable. But don't trust-funds get blown through all the time? Or is it just that kids with trust-funds who favor pre-owned flannel, not new cars and cocaine, don't make a dent in their piles of cash, no matter how many backpacking trips they take, how many hostels per city? And aren't there offspring of wealthy parents out there whose parents would possibly help them out in an emergency, but who past some age (18, college graduation) are on their own? Are they still "1%" because of having attended only expensive schools, having had tutors, having lived in nice neighborhoods, etc.? Am I just incredibly naive, and massively underestimating the amount of family money floating around?

-I guess it's admirable that these 1%ers are not doing what I half-suspect I'd do if I found myself with a few mil to toss around, which is going to Paris without grad school paying for any of it, buying an apartment next to the Boulanger des Invalides, and using whatever was left over on pastries, books, and Bichons.