Even if you’re just in the top 15 percent among everyone alive, if you include all the people who’ve ever lived in your calculations, past and present — some 100 billion people — then you’re definitely in the top 1 percent. You even live better than kings and queens of old; they lived in highly primitive conditions, by our standards. (The absence of modern medicine, resulting in frequent death, was one such hardship.)
So do you think your average $200-a-year Burundian has much sympathy for a $30,000-a-year OWS protester who’s speaking out against the top 1 percent of Americans? That’s like us having sympathy for millionaires who are living the good life but who are outraged that billionaires are better off than them.
In other words, OWSers, you have it so good here in America that most of the world’s people probably have no sympathy for you. So quit getting so worked up over other people being richer than you, and start appreciating the good things that you do have here in America.
Patrick D. Chisholm is founder and creative director of Accentance, Inc. and blogs at PolicyDynamics.org.
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