Last week in class we watched Michael Moore’s movie ‘Capitalism:
A Love Story’. This movie was a documentary based off the financial crisis the
United States suffered in the late 2000’s. Basically he informed us how major corporations
dominate the lower 97% of people, then clearly painted the picture that those corporations
can take away whatever they want from the hard working middle class. The rich
have everything and the poor have nothing.
The movie started to feel very personal, because my family experienced
some of the same things a lot of people and our country were experiencing,
primarily the house foreclosures. In 2007 my father pulled out a small loan our
house to help pay for medical expenses for my handicapped brother Ian. He was certain
that he would be able to pay off the loan, because he made $40,000 a year at
the time. Unaware of the impossible percentages on top of what he had to
payback, he never broke even on this loan and eventually defaulted on house
payments.
I did not realize how the rest of the country was experiencing
the same situation my family was. My father ended up losing his job, and in
attempt to save our house he cashed out his IRA’s and 401K, leaving him with
nothing for his retirement; all that
effort was for nothing, because he still lost the house he worked so hard to keep.
It stirred up a whole lot of frustration knowing that big
banks got away with practically murder and left hundreds of thousands of people
out of their homes and millions of people taken advantaged of through the big
bail out. Mainly it gave me another dose of being powerless over situations
like this.
Mainly this movie gave me another dose of being truly
powerless over situations like this such as the American people suffering from
our government’s poor choices and decision making.
I hope America can Learn from past mistakes and take better care of our hard working middle class citizens.
No comments:
Post a Comment