The protestors are out there, but nothing is going to change. Photo from Tom Clark's Beyond the Pale.

I’ve got news for those folks – the people protesting on Wall Street, united or not, will always be defeated. Why? Simple. If your rank and file members are anti-Semitic or anti-any group of people, you will never win over the masses. Oh, sure – you might draw in a few thousand people in New York City and maybe even a million or so from coast-to-coast. But even if you drew in 1 million people to support your cause, you’d be a minor fraction of a percent of the American public. Here’s the simple math: 1,000,000 people who are protesting (and, apparently, don’t mind the anti-Semites in their ranks) divided by 320,000,000 Americans = 0.003125 percent of the American public.

That’s not even enough support to warrant one millisecond of any Wall Street banker’s day.

But that’s not my message – that’s just some discussion on what I saw in that hateful, disgusting video. Here’s my message to the OWS protestors:

You are mainly the cause of your own pain.

I’m in the rare position to be able to feel the pain that these protestors are complaining about. These are the kids who went to college, majored in the humanities, and now can’t find a job with their art, English, sociology, political science, gender studies, etc. degree. I feel their pain because I graduated from my college with a bachelors degree in English. The difference between where the protestors are in life and where I am in life is that I didn’t view that humanities degree as a means to an end. In other words, I never thought that getting that degree 1) guaranteed me a job after graduating, 2) guaranteed me any respect after graduating, and/or 3) meant anything other than that I read a lot of literature and cranked out a bunch of academic-style research papers.

The larger difference between the protestors and a guy like me, though, is that I don’t believe my own bullshit. Here’s a brief explanation of what I’m talking about… Thanks to my work with volunteering to my local fraternity, I’ve watched a generation of young kids grow into an unrealistic adulthood. Their adulthood is unrealistic because they actually believe the bullshit that they spew. For example, it’s not uncommon for me to encounter an undergraduate who tells me that his Father/uncle/cousin/Grandfather is a major executive at XYZ Corporation and that once he graduates he’s going to get a good job there (or some variant of that story). And, almost invariably, when it comes time for that undergraduate to move on from college they either don’t graduate at all or wind up working at a completely different company than the one that their familial relationship was supposed to just hand them. Regardless of that reality playing out time and time again, I see more and more young people coming into the academic environment with that entitled mindset. As one of my old professors tells me whenever we have lunch together, there are kids entering college today with the attitude of, “I have arrived!”

And no one gives a shit that they’ve arrived.

So if you are one of the many, many protestors on Wall Street who are complaining that you can’t find a job because of the evil corporations, what you should really be complaining about is a university atmosphere that served you a tall glass of bullshit-flavored Kool-Aid. That’s right – the very same ivory tower where you fell in love with Chaucer, literary reviews of British literature during the Industrial Revolution, or the gender equality struggle in the Middle East (which is something that I’m passionate about, too), is the same ivory tower that duped you into believing that your passion for these causes and issues would be enough to support your life post-graduation.

They lied to you. The professor that you fell in love with because you really believed and felt that they had a passion for their work – they are part of a much larger, much greedier institution than Wall Street. They push an ideal that has proven throughout the ages to never be sustainable – namely, that you can be a 100% humanistic, artistic society and thrive. It’s not possible. Someone has to actually do the work that moves a person, family, community, and country forward. Someone has to get up in the morning and make the donuts. Someone has to pump the gas. Someone has to mow the lawn. Those are the jobs that a civilized society needs filled.

We don’t need someone to sit around and debate the pros and cons of Shakespearean iambic pentameter in adequately representing the struggle for equality during Elizabethan times. Do people get to sit around and have this argument? Of course they do! Are those people ever going to be YOU? Not likely. The people who get to sit around and sip tea while having these high-minded discussions are the same ones who have been doing that for the last fifty years – and they’re not going anywhere any time soon.

In conclusion, I strongly recommend that the OWS protestors take that rage, take that anger, take that hatred towards a bleak future and direct it towards a societal system that nearly forces us all to go to college. The protestors are also complaining about mountains of student loan debt and no serious jobs to help them pay down the debt. Take it from a guy who graduated with a humanities degree (two, actually, when you count the master’s degree) and $121,000 in student loan debt – I feel your pain. You’ve been lied to all of your lives. However, don’t lash out like spoiled children are wont to do. Instead, now is the time to break free from the intellectual shackles that have been harnessing your free thought and true understanding of reality.

Rip off those shackles. Let loose your mind. Begin to think, seriously, about why the world is as it is today. Why are students graduating in a future where they see no hope? Why are corporations always going to put the concerns of their shareholders (i.e. profit) first? Why is it that your protests won’t mean a thing to anyone who actually matters?

Think about those questions as they exist in reality and work towards a reasonable solution. Strip your mind of the prejudices that an over-liberal education have harnessed them with and come to understand what the real world is like today, tomorrow, and into the future. Protesting the job creators is not the answer, folks. The problem is the perpetuation of a national standard that damn near forces its young people to enroll in a collegiate system that is hyper-focused on making a profit while largely shackling creativity by allowing students to graduate while still believing their own bullshit.

Fix that problem and everything else will eventually fall in line.

I had no idea what to expect coming into this book. A few years ago I read Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner and I enjoyed his writing style. So, based on being pleased with the other book, I picked up A Thousand Splendid Suns and let me tell you – this is one hell of a story! It’s the story of two women in Afghanistan and their struggles for respect and the ability to live a decent life in a country that is seemingly in a constant state of war. The novel is brilliantly written and is at times both heart-wrenching and brutal. At some point in the novel, the reader is actually pressed to expect the worst outcome for these women in any pending situation. Hosseini captures despair unlike any other writer that I’ve read in the last few years.

The story’s two main female characters are Mariam and Laila. The two women are separated by a number of years, but they wind up as wives to a hardcore man who beats and humiliates them. It’s tough to read at some points, but the quality of the writing makes it worth the intensity. Though these two are wives to the same man, their histories are anything but similar. Mariam grows up as the unwanted child of a wealthy man who conceived her with a servant woman. Being of such a history, Mariam is cast aside and literally lives in a hut until her mother passes away (the story kicks into high gear at this point, but I won’t spoil it for you). Mariam is then sent off to marry a man name Rasheed who requires her to follow a strict Islamic lifestyle, which includes wearing a burqa and being subservient to her husband.

Laila, on the other hand, grows up across the street from Mariam and Rasheed. Her father is a university professor before the Soviets begin to occupy the country. As a professor, he stresses the importance of Laila getting an education which ultimately brings Laila’s life full circle (you need to get to the end of the book to understand that piece of the story). Laila grows up with a young boy named Tariq. The two of them share a budding love story until the war gets so bad that Tariq’s family is forced to leave Kabul (which is where the bulk of the story takes place). From that point, the story take a variety of twists and turns.

After her family is killed, Laila winds up as Rasheed’s second wife. One of the most well written parts of the book is when Laila gets beaten for the first time by Rasheed. It really puts the reader in a position to hate Rasheed, which is where I found myself about midway through the book.

The rest of the story deals with Laila’s children, her desire to preserve what she had with Tariq, and Mariam wanting her life to mean something of importance (which it ultimately does). Of course, there’s a lot more to this story to fill its 415 pages and I encourage you to read the novel to get a full picture of this wonderfully written story.

In an Afterword, Hosseini asks his readers to look at the United Nations website regarding refugee services and support. Feel free to click on that link to see the website. And, if you’re looking for a startlingly powerful and brilliantly written read, then I suggest picking up A Thousand Splendid Suns.

The Kite Runner is a powerful story of a man named Amir. The story follows Amir from his days as a young boy to a fully grown man. Amir is born a child of privilege in Afghanistan during the 1970’s. His father, Baba, is a well known Afghani having given many of his neighbors their first “chance” whether it be a loan or a job or a hand out when it was most needed. Baba has a servant, Ali, who has a son named Hassan. Amir and Hassan grow up together and The Kite Runner is essentially the story of how their close friendship affects Amir for the rest of his life (or at least until the end of the book).

Hassan is fiercely loyal and protects Amir from some of the bad kids in the neighborhood – though he does this at the cost of his own safety. Ultimately, defending Amir puts Hassan in a situation where he is harshly abused by another boy and his two cronies. Amir witnesses the assault and his response determines the path of his mental stability for the rest of his life (or depending upon how you read the book, until the end of the story).

Amir buries his knowledge of the assault and goes on living with Baba until the Russians begin to invade Afghanistan. At that point he is rushed with his father out of the country and they eventually wind up in America. Baba – who has given Amir much of the direction in his life – passes away from cancer, but not before assisting Amir in becoming engaged to a young Afghanistan woman named Soraya. It turns out that there is a large Afghan community in the San Francisco area and Amir becomes a part of this community with his new wife and her family. Then, almost out of the blue, he is called to Pakistan at the request of one of his father’s former business associates who is now dying. Before the associate passes away, he makes a request of Amir: to make everything good again for both his father and himself. To make things good, Amir will need to find Hassan’s son, Sohrab, and bring him to a better life.

The story gets very quick and very interesting at this point and the last hundred pages or so are very good. As a child, Amir won a large kite-flying tournament and he had some assistance from Hassan to help collect the prize kite. The final scenes of this book revisit a kite race setting and gives hope to the reader that there might be hope for Hassan’s son, Sohrab.

There are times during this story when I feel like Amir tortures himself too much over his inaction as a child. Amir expects much from himself, but that is because of what his father expected of him as a young boy. I wonder if all young people have this mentality about themselves and their actions. I hope not!

I am grossly oversimplifying the last 100 pages of the book for the sake of this review, but I would suggest reading The Kite Runner if you have some free time and are looking for a good story. And if you do read it, let me know what you thought!