>>if you examine the snotty white OWS kids, I think you’ll find a preponderance who grew up with an absent,divorced father paying the bills<<
The poor I work with, have no bio-father present, and mom is in jail. They are being raised by older sibs and relatives. What we would describe as a *intact family* is not present.
Starting in the teen years, what these kids desperately need is a vocational education [building trades, agriculture, engine repair, culinary, etc.]; instead they are *all* told to go to college. For a long time, kids were steered away from the vocational schools in CT and there aren’t too many of these programs left.
In NYC schools vocationals are on a downward trend. There are many new career oriented schools opening, but the positions require academic work beyond HS. Things like journalism, media, finance etc. The old trade schools,except maybe Aviation HS, are falling by the wayside. Yet the city and surrounding areas have a dearth of people who can be carpenters, dry cleaners, plumbers, a/c repair etc. These skills are left to the for profit schools that advertise on afternoon TV, and whose record of success and honesty is not always believable. You’re quite correct about the college for all nonsense. I don’t know how many barely literate 8th graders I saw from Queensbridge Houses who told me they wanted to be a lawyer when it was unlikely they’d ever learn enough to even serve a subpoena.
Actually, most of the OWS “kids” probably do have a father at home, one who is making big bucks doing something the OWS kid is protesting against. But the kid knows he can do it and get away with it because all will be forgiven and forgotten in a couple of years when said OWS “kid” wants a job with Daddy’s firm.
That’s how it was back in the 60s. It was the priviledged kids out there “protesting.” I was in college then and I knew some of this group...and I remember once being invited to the home of one of them after he was returning from a demonstration. The maid had laid out a lovely spread for us.
I don’t know what this guy is doing now, but I’d assume he’s probably a successful lawyer/media person/investment banker - and is the father of one of these OWS goombahs. The reason they’re doing this is that know it doesn’t mean anything, but it makes them feel important for a moment and lets them symbolically rebel against their fathers. Freud was wrong on most things, but he was right on this.