Striking letter to the editor in the Wichita Eagle this morning, from Debbie Jabara. Don't know anything about her personally, but the Jabara family name is eminent enough that it adorns an airport. She was either born into money, or married into it. Either way she seems to have gotten the knack of being rich and privileged and ungrateful:

Just musing on the differences between the Occupy Wall Street and tea party protesters.

The tea partiers were conservatively dressed, stayed in RVs or hotels, did not urinate on anything or anyone, and did not riot or steal. They also bathed and picked up their own trash. Occupy protesters damaged private property, camped out on public property and generally left filfth in their wake.

Tea partiers know their math. They represent the 50 percent of Americans who are suppliesr of government services. Do the Occupy protesters realize that they actually represent the 50 percent of Americans (if all are American) who are takers?

The tea parties want less government and less spending on their hard-earned money by the government. Occupiers want more government and more spending of taxpayers' money -- on them.

Sadly, as the 50 percent who are takers likely will increase in the coming years, what hope do we have of remaining the nation envisioned by the Founding Fathers? I worry -- not for myself, but for my children and grandchildren, who will be burdened by heavy taxation to take care of these freeloaders.

It wasn't too long ago when it was commonly understood that it was the rich who were the freeloaders, collecting rents through their control of property and exploiting workers -- the people who actually made things and provided services -- for their profits. Moreover, that understanding is certain to return as the ill effects of ever-more-concentrated wealth become too obvious to rationalize away -- as will the notion that the idle rich have become decadent and delirious and depraved.

The tea party movement will be remembered as a lot of hoo-ha bankrolled by right-wing billionaires and ballyhooed by the usual crowd of Fox demagogues to advance their political agenda, then abandoned when it became embarrassing. The government they railed about is one that flows both ways depending on who has the most political clout: it could be used to better serve the interests of those OWS recognizes as the 99% -- and indeed in a democracy that is how it should work -- or it can be used, as it increasingly has been over the last thirty years, to help the rich plunder the rest. Aristocrats, like the Jabaras, have always feared that democracy might permit the masses to help themselves. But they have never been able to choose the nature or manners of the mobs that rise up to counter them -- except to make them worse by violent repression.