It was very sad for me to hear news reports that a Princeton student taunted a group of Occupy the Highway protesters with the statement, “We’re the 1 percent,” while others called out, “Get a job.” Another student is reported to have said: “Princeton students are benefiting from this system, so why would they protest?”
Graduates of Princeton might ask what is the responsibility of the 1 percent. Do we say: “When someone has been given much, much will be required in return” (Luke 12:48)? An alternative is to say: “We who have much will take much more.”
In 2000, I hosted a conference at the Princeton School of Architecture called “Design for the 98 percent.” At that conference, Samuel Mockbee, winner of a MacArthur fellowship and the AIA gold medal, stated: “Walt Whitman said that the most obscene word in the English language is exclusion, such as exclusion from a gated community or a country club or the democratic process.”
As a graduate of both Princeton and Yale, and having been a Fellow at Harvard, I want to say that the responsibilities I feel to the fundamentals of democracy are immense. The 99 percent should have a representative voice in the decisions made for this country. I did not feel this way as a freshman — and it should be noted that the taunting student is a freshman. I can only hope that he and any of his peers who agree with him also come to a similar realization about their future role in the world.