Smart enough to know better

We are the educated poor, a class-within-a-class of the working poor. We have above-average education, some with Master's degrees or higher, crushed under the burden of staggering student loans and working for minimal wages, often without adequate insurance for cars, health care or dental needs.
Growing up in a time when the perception that anything was possible, with people getting blindingly rich playing the stocks or investing in dot-com startups with record-setting IPO's, we were raised with the view that hard work and education would ensure a comfortable life, and with a bit of luck, we could even retire relatively rich, ending our days in comfort and satisfaction. The American Dream, indeed. We have been misled.
We have been misled by those in power and those who stand to gain from the tide of people looking for a better lot in life who have been fed the notion that education will ensure that we will be in demand, risen above the uneducated, first in line for the good jobs. This may have been the case twenty or thirty years ago, when the delineation between industrial jobs and the emerging high-tech middle class, when education was necessary to comprehend the new technology and stay abreast of emerging trends, but we have become such a specialized society that the employment market is becoming saturated with qualified applicants. This is great for the furtherance of technological breakthroughs and research, but what of those not at the absolute top of their field? There are millions of qualified job seekers who are edged out by an applicant who has been specializing like an ant since near conception, left to search for the average entry-level skilled position. These positions have historically been populated with many an employee who has been working the same position since their entry into the field, often starting out at the absolute bottom as a high-school student with few needs and willing and able to work for the pittance wages offered therein. A college degree was supposed to have leveled the field, playing experience off of knowledge and ability to bring new ideas to the position, but there are no positions to be had but those which cannot offer enough to even begin to make our looming payments.
Now we who have forgone the long-term investment in the low ladder of menial positions in favor of struggling for an education in order to better ourselves find that we are being left out in the cold in the Bush-ridden job market, consigned to a litany of unpleasant choices in constructing our future, our dreams of a comfortable middle-class life smothered. We live to work so that we can pay our crushing student loan debts, fighting to afford food and rent, disillusioned and cynical, and many of us turn to self-destructive comforts that provide effective, if temporary reprieve. Our hard-won degrees useless, we are left without options in increasingly desperate situations, frustrated and snarling, doing no one any real good, often putting burdens on the state for assistance that the government is exponentially reducing, leaving more and more to fend for themselves like rats. And when too many rats get put in a cage, they start eating each other--crime rates rise as fewer legal opportunities are available, and spiraling down, too busy surviving to take interest in community or government, allowing laws to be passed by the affluent for the benefit of the affluent, and mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
This cannot continue--the center is corrupt and the outer rings are being whipped to shreds. We, as those educated enough to have a better-than-average grasp of the situation (I don't think anyone really knows, short of maybe Alan Greenspan and a small group of alien residents) have to make the effort to do something about it, as those with the ability to do something have the responsibility to do it, if only by voting (I'll get into the voting rant in another section) and paying attention. Let's band together, organize, DO something!!! A revolution is coming, and we can make it a quiet one. Otherwise, it's not going to be pretty.