The One Percent

Tonight I watched a great documentary called "The One Percent". You can watch the entire documentary on YouTube for free by clicking the link above. I did not hear about the documentary until my friend posted a link to the documentary on my Facebook wall. The documentary was created by the heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, Jamie Johnson.

The documentary was created in 2006, more than a year before the beginning of the financial crisis, and more than 5 years before the start of the Arab Spring and Occupy protests. It hits on many interesting points with respect to the growing income and wealth inequality of the rich vs the poor in America (and rest of the world). I am surprised that the movie was created BEFORE the current protests, which means that people such as Jamie Johnson, Ralph Nader, Bill Gates Sr., etc. have seen the problems of the growing gap between the rich and the poor way before the financial crisis. Does this mean if it wasn't for the biggest recession since the Great Depression people would not notice how much they are being FUCKED by the corrupt politicians and the greedy rich bastards? That's sad, I must admit.

But it is probably not the people's fault. During the movie somebody (can't remember who now) mentions that the Congress does what the people want - except that the people are given false, misleading information that benefits the rich (not to mention the propaganda by the political parties) and therefore making it seem as if the people are the ones who Congress listens to.

I did say that I will not write any more posts about American politics, and I am not. This is not about politics. This is about the need for the majority of the people of the world to rise up against this inequality and do something about it. Anyway, this wasn't one of my best posts but I hope you watch the movie and learn something from it.

Optimism

I consider myself an optimist. When I look at the future, I will tend to focus on positive outcomes vs the negative ones. If something negative happens to me, I will take away as many positives as I can and try to rationalize the negatives so that they do not happen again. On the other hand, my father is a pessimist. He tends to focus primarily on the negative effects of any event. When I get a new job as a contractor several years ago, his main thoughts were, "What happens if there is not enough work? What about health insurance? What if the project is cancelled?" whereas my thoughts were more along the lines of, "I can make a lot of money. I get to work on a variety of projects and get varied experience. I will have a more flexible lifestyle."

I read this page today which made me think a bit more about optimism: The Road to Well-Being - The Plains of Optimism. I did not bother to check the references but there ARE references on the bottom of the page. The article/paper reaffirms my opinion that being optimistic improves your health and helps a person overcome negative events better than a pessimist. There are definitely good characteristics of a pessimist person. A pessimist can prepare himself/herself for negative outcomes since he/she will focus on those events. However, a pessimist will almost always worry about how something can go wrong and that can cause psychological and physical strain. I prefer to assume that good things will happen and worry only when the bad things happen but also prepare for those bad events. I used to think that this was being a realist but according to this paper it seems that it is natural for an optimist to more realistically evaluate a negative event than a pessimist. This more realistic evaluation helps an optimist prepare better for the next event by more accurately dissecting a negative event.

I don't think I will change any pessimist's mind with this post but I hope some of you start thinking more positively :).