Meagan Maguire is attending the "Occupy Maine" rally in Portland's Monument Square this Saturday at noon. This is a guest op-ed and the Exception Magazine does not necessarily share the views expressed below.

There is an intolerable system in America. Thousands die from lack of healthcare. People go hungry. Students are left with thousands of dollars in debt for degrees that get them nowhere.

The day September 17 was not chosen arbitrarily for the beginning of the Wall Street occupation. It was also “Luxury Night Out,” an event which consists of millionaires taking to the street to look at dresses that would provide ample healthcare to one of their fellow countrymen for a year and cars that cost more than the average American makes in two years.

There is a social contract that has been broken here. As Elisabeth Warren articulated in her recent talk “you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces the rest of us paid for.” The wealth that is accrued in this country is a product of much more than the individual. America is a nation of a united people who depend on each other for prosperity. The social contract needs to be upheld if America is to succeed. And it is not being upheld.

We find it insane that in the wealthiest of nations, people should go without basic needs. We find it ridiculous that the market demands us to have degrees in order to flourish and simultaneously demands we take on debts we cannot handle in order to achieve those degrees.

I will not pretend that we have everything figured out. Currently there is voting going on to determine exactly which issues will be attacked using which tactics. It is important to remember how ludicrous it would be to expect any movement or school of ideas to pop out of the woodwork fully finished. The occupation is however, as the editor of the United Kindgom’s “The Indypendent” puts it "also a laboratory of possibility, and that’s the beauty of democracy. As opposed to our monoculture world, where political life is flipping a lever every four years, social life is being a consumer and economic life is being a timid cog, the Wall Street occupation is creating a polyculture of ideas, expression and art." 

We ask only for the right to go to school and work and live with dignity. We ask only for our right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" promised to us. For too long have many of us gone without. And so for this reason we shall rally.