From the Occupied Lexington Herald
Letters from 99ers
To the gentleman that yelled “Get a job” at me while I was protesting Wall Street yesterday: I do have a job, thank you—two jobs, in fact. I also go to school full-time. There was a time when I didn’t, though.
I was unemployed for nine months once. I lost my job while Bush was in office, and a month after my wife, stepdaughter and I moved into our first home. Two months later, I was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. Then my health insurance dropped me and my medications went from 20$ a month to 200$ a month. You see, my body does not produce insulin; therefore, I will die without my medication. My wife, who does fairly well with her job as a hairstylist, had enough saved and was able to keep the roof over our family’s head. When it eventually became clear that I was not going to find a job before my unemployment and our savings ran out, I decided to enroll in grad school, partly to ensure a job in the future, but mostly because I needed the health insurance and loans that school provides.
In order to keep our home, pay my medical bills and save some small bit of money before our second child is born, I work 30 – 40 hours a week as a manager at a local restaurant and substitute teacher while also taking out my full share of student loans. My wife also works around 40 hours a week, on her feet, while carrying our second child.
No longer silent. Photo by Amanda Wallace. Courtesy Occupy Lexington Flickr site.
It is a shame I am not as fortunate as you, dear sir, with your newly washed sport utility vehicle and freshly pressed suit. I suppose from your perspective it is my own damn fault to be where I am, but I was much like you once. I too worked in insurance and financial services. I too imagined having a fancy car and nice clothes. But then I lost my job because I wasn’t bringing in enough new clients to invest their money with us. Everyone was understandably frightened by the falling market in 2007 and was more interested in holding on to their money for fear of the crash to come.
I didn’t expect to end up where I am. I was a bit more optimistic then. I truly didn’t understand how an intelligent person with a liberal arts degree and extensive experience in management could eventually be struggling to feed himself and his family. But we live in a system that values profit over people; a system that won’t insure me because they know I require routine medical care and will probably die before I am 60; a system that requires my family and I to go into debt so that I can eventually make an honest living, a system that values war over education, wall street over main street, building factories in China over building bridges in America. We belong to a system that benefits the top minority rather than the bottom majority; a system that will kick a family out of their home and reward the corporations that made it impossible for that family to keep that home. Who got bailed out? The banks got bailed out. Who got sold out? We got sold out. We are the 99%.
Your fellow American,
Billy Petot
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