The Heartbreaking Right-Wing Version of ‘We Are the 99 Percent’

The Heartbreaking Right-Wing Version of ‘We Are the 99 Percent’:

One would expect mocking of We Are The 53%, but in fact the site is “heartbreaking”, writes Gawker:

Did you know that if you are uninsured or jobless, you should just suck it up? That if you’re overworked or underemployed, you should be thankful? Learn all that—and more!—at “We Are the 53%,” the right wing’s incredibly depressing response to Occupy Wall Street!

We Are the 53%” was created thought up by CNN’s chief goat-fucking correspondent Erick Erickson as a response to “We Are the 99 Percent,” an Occupy Wall Street-affiliated blog that collects the stories of the underemployed, overworked, debt-ridden and uninsured victims of the recession. The blog, run by conservative filmmaker Mike Wilson, gets its name from the popular (and wildly simplistic!) Republican talking point that only 53 percent of households pay federal income taxes.

What makes “We Are the 53%” so heartbreaking isn’t that its contributors are enormous jerks—it’s that so many of them could just as easily be writing in to We Are the 99 Percent. Like the “former marine” in the center who hasn’t had “4 consecutive days off in 4 years.” The phrase “I don’t have health insurance” pops up frequently on “We Are the 53%,” but not as a cry for help or an indictment of a broken system. Here, it’s a badge of pride.

You’d think that someone who “never had the option of parental health insurance to age 26″ would see why such a policy makes sense, or that a person who used welfare and food stamps after suffering an injury and losing her job might understand better than anyone else the value of a social safety net. But, nope! Basic ideas (some might even call them “human rights”!) like “paid time off” and “health insurance” and “a living wage” are apparently the demands of an unreasonably entitled parasitic class.

This is where the best of American values meet their most masochistic applications. Did you work 60-70 hours a week for nearly a decade to get a college degree after serving in this country’s military? This is America! Drive on! Do you now have two different jobs, neither of which will pay you insurance? Stop whining and suck it up! And if any of those problems are directly attributable to reckless, self-serving behavior on the part of enormous banking conglomerates, for God’s sake don’t blame them! You are the 53 percent!