We Are the 99 Percent - I graduated with a Masters degree from one of the...

12th October 2011

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I graduated with a Masters degree from one of the best architecture schools in the world, filled with visionaries with the knowledge, skills and passion to build the kind of world we all dream of, except nobody in this economic system has any incentive to hire them to do anything remotely like that. At our graduation, one professor remarked that we’d be spending the rest of our lives building strip malls. Then the economy collapsed and I did what I was told… putting on a suit and tie every morning and making job searching a full time job. Six months and one interview later, I had produced nothing of value to anyone and was still living off mom and her soul killing job. I was then 35 years old and had a world of work experience. I knew the only thing to do was walk away from the game.

I vowed I would do what I love even if it meant starving and doing it for free, so I did just that for three years. I’ve since worked on some of the most innovative treehouses in the world, I’ve designed and built in Haiti (You want to see the real results of our wonderful foreign and economic policies?) I’ve built community gardens, geodesic structures, and I’m engineering water catchment systems, hanging gardens and solar updraft power plants so that we can get free of this system as a whole culture.

For the first time in my life I’m using my real gifts even though it’s meant living in vans and tents and on couches often after 14 hour build days. I’m 3 months behind on rent now, and thank god I have my health and youth. And for those of you with student loans, they HAVE to offer this to you if you ask, but they WON’T tell you if you don’t: call your loan officers and ask about Income Based Repayment.

Oh… and I’ve also been learning about alternative economic systems. Have a read of Thomas Greco, especially “Money: Understanding and Creating Alternatives to Legal Tender.” Get behind alternative currencies like Ripple and use them, have a look at Vertecology.com’s response to Tomas Greco’s “End of Money” for an exploration of how to build a just, sustainable and abundant economy. Have a look at City Repair as a successful model for taking back our cities. Get involved, read, build, plant and walk away from their dirty money. Forget the Republibots and the Decepticrats, that game is bought and paid for. We won’t be free until we’re doing food forestry in the cities and legal tender laws have been abolished.

I’m not armed, but I am dangerous. Watch out.

I am the 99%. Occupywallst.org