Want me to dissect your whine?
I wasn't looking for pity, I was just trying to provide a dose of perspective. Supporting or taking part of the OWS protests does not automatically make you a whining leftist, nor even significantly increase the probability that you ARE a whining leftist. There are plenty of productive, hard-working people that are pissed off too.
1) Considering you say you "spent 2 years serving my country, 6 of them getting shot in Kandahar" I'm going to guess your math skills might be why had trouble finding a job.
Sorry, that was a typo. It should read "6 months of them"
2) You relocated to DC Metro...for why? Lowest unemployment not quite - US average 9.1%, Washington DC is 10.9%. Assuming you meant Arlington, etc sure, the unemployment rates are low, but there are a lot of reasons for that that have nothing to do with availability of jobs - could be that it's so damn expensive, the unemployed are forced out quickly. Personally, considering how easy the internet has made wide-ranging search and communication, the idea of moving to a place and THEN expecting to find a job there is fairly retarded.
I relocated when I received a job offer, which happened to be only a few hours away. My job search was nationwide, and relocation was pretty much inevitable as I attended a rural and remote campus.
And I used the term "DC Metro area" which would imply, yes, I did mean "Arlington, etc." The DC-MD-VA Metropolitan Statistical Area has an unemployment rate of 6.1, well below the national average.
Those are pretty damn good salaries. I don't give a flying shit what your peers were offered 5 years and a different economy ago, and honestly, it shouldn't matter to you unless your main goal is self-pity.
My whole point was the fact that the economy is totally different, I'm not interested in pity. I'm thankful to have a job that affords me a comfortable standard of living. But that doesn't diminish the fact that over the last 5 years, wages have shrunk while inflation has barely slowed. Look back further, and real wages have been dropping for decades.
4) I don't disagree with you about the bullshit bailouts. So why are you protesting Wall Street? We have elected representatives and big fat books of laws that were supposed to be regulating this. You're protesting wolves being wolves, when the guys we elected to watch the wolves are either entirely asleep (or worse, mating with them). Point your anger at the problem.
It's not about "protesting Wall Street." Protesting on Wall Street is a symbolic gesture, but the anger is directed at politicians more concerned about campaign donations and lobbyist bribes from the financial sector than the interest of the American middle class. The wolves were able to eat the sheep because the shepherd was more interested in the stripper that the wolves hired than watching his flock.