A recent letter to the Bellevue Reporter commenting on the occupy movement suggest the protesters motives arise from having “grown up in a society where no one is allowed to ‘fail'” and not being “exposed to the ‘shame’ of losing.”

It goes on to imply that the removal of failure from everything from competitive sports to federal benefits by creating safety nets has given rise to a kind of spoiled child mentality in which people having never been denied will greedily lash out for more.

I disagree.

Politics and economics are not games. For most people in this country, it is life and death. Occupy protesters know this because they have lived in our society, where in spite of a massive GDP and CEO stock options go through the roof, they see themselves and their friends and family suffer, and better times looking less likely every day.

They don’t need to get pounded on a football field, because life has dished out a punishment that doesn’t end with a blown whistle and snack time. They’ve gone into massive college debt and can’t find a wage decent enough climb out.

They have watched their parents struggle to raise them as best they could their whole life, only to see them now struggle to pay for the basic human dignity of medical care.

They are facing a lifetime of clawing at the carcass of the middle class, which continues to slowly disappear. All of this in the richest country in the world. All of this while some would look them in the eye and call them failures.

They are well versed in the pain of losing.

But this has driven some to the courageous act of not accepting the “loser” status some would apply to them for failure in this rigged game.

Above all, they will not accept the shame that you heap on them, for they know how the bludgeon of shame works, threatening them into believing what others wish them to believe, and not what they see out of their own eyes. They will not accept shame because they have no reason to. Perhaps more than anyone else, they have nothing to be ashamed of.

As the saying goes: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

Those of us who should be ashamed are the ones that sit idly and do not stand against evil in their lives.

If life is a game, this is it. It is not how much money you have made, or how strong and intelligent the children you raise are, but your neighbor’s children. The children of the poorest and worst off among you. The children of those beset by evil. The children of the “losers.”

Because their fate is no different from your own.

Everett Phillips, Bellevue