It seems like yesterday there were thousands of protesters at Wall Street. Why were they protesting? Some said Wall Street’s greed, corruption, the wars; some even said the protesters want some handouts!

But lo and behold there are not so obvious reasons! Two words: indentured servitude. Or debt slavery. What!? That’s absurd! Well let’s take a look at it shall we? A lot of the protesters are young, well-educated individuals with various college degrees, most of whom had to borrow money to pay for college. So they get their degree and while doing so, they incur a huge amount of debt they cannot, by law, file for bankruptcy in order to relieve themselves of it.

So they get a degree, and guess what? They can’t get a well-paying job in their field of study. So now what? They are on average $20,000 or more in debt, and they, by law, have to pay it back. But how? I mean, getting a job at McDonald’s isn’t easy nowadays! So they decided to protest by wielding flowers and signs. They chose a Gandhi style of protest.

So how did our leaders respond to their peaceful protests? Did they punish Wall Street criminals or the banks for their role in destroying our economy? No, they decided to use riot police to pepper spray and fire rubber bullets at the flower-wielding protestors!

Fast forward to today. We don’t hear anything about the protests anymore. All we hear on the news is how “messed up” and “sick” our society is. They blame violent movies, video games, drugs, guns, parenting, etc., and, yes, there is a lot of truth to all of those points, but one thing is certain: The fish rots from the head down.

Our politicians and the media continue to state that we, the people, as a society are violent in nature. But we as a society have pleaded to our leaders to bring our troops home! We as a society voted for the promises of our elected leaders to reduce the debt and bring our troops home, but instead they start new wars! In fact, they literally have to con and lie to us to start the wars! Does “weapons of mass destruction” ring a bell? That lie has killed more than one million Iraqis and more than 4,000 of our U.S. troops.

What are the effects of a country that is continually waging war after war? Well, during war, our troops see things that the human eyes were never meant to see, the effects of which we have recently discovered and named—think PTSD, post traumatic stress disorder—so how do we help our troops who have experienced and seen these horrors as a result of their selfless service? Our leaders tell them that what they have experienced must not be expressed. I don’t know about you, but if I had experienced a fraction of what our brave troops see in their multiple tours of service, I am almost certain I would succumb to self medication in the form of alcohol—or anything, for that matter—to numb the pain of the horrors I had witnessed. This impacts our troops’ families more than we will ever know, and in some cases leaves our children with a single parent (troop suicide is 17.5 per 100,000).

Our leaders and media are stating that we must ban “semi-automatic rifles” from our law-abiding citizens and that their priority is the safety of our children. Wall Street, the banks, and our leaders are in collusion. They are afraid of the next Occupy Wall Street—that it will not be called Occupy but will be known as the American Revolution, and that the participants will continue to wield flowers and signs to spread the message and the ideology that we do not have to comply with those who have enslaved us with massive debt, who have committed mass murder in our names, who have decimated our families, and who have corrupted our morals.

David Torik lives in San Luis Obispo. Send comments to the executive editor at [email protected].