The Occupation of a Lifetime

Everyone is occupying something somewhere right now. Wall Street, of course, where it began, though it'll be interesting to see what happens now that cold weather is about to hit New York City. Madison, Phoenix. Rome. London. Responses to the ongoing occupations of cities across the world have varied; where I live, as soon as three people exchanged

tweets using the word "occupy," the city designated a park for their use and set up portapotties; in Phoenix, when three dozen Occupiers gathered with signs, police poured out of vans wearing full riot gear and hauled a third of the Occupiers off to jail for trespassing.

To the best of my knowledge, everything the Occupiers are saying is true. Well, except for their claim that they are the 99 percent. What is true is that most of us have nothing. Most of us are not part of the one percent who own everything, including us. Our bank accounts are as empty as the U.S. Treasury. We are in debt over our ears, whatever that means. We are the nation. We don't talk to people who disagree with us. We speak in meaningless signage: No concealed weapons allowed in the building. Don't ask don't tell. We don't want to know what that lump is.

Winter's coming. Even protest takes a holiday in the summer months; we all need vacations. Last winter I froze on the pavement outside my state's Capitol. Now the zinnias in my garden are all hanging their heads bowed, their colors shamed into obscurity by last night's frost. It's winter, and the conservatives who own the utility companies and the oil rigs and the pipelines and the financial empires that mortgage these

industries to our detriment are turning up their thermostats and locking us out in the cold again. It's gonna be another long, cold season. And it's protest season again, it seems.

I just walked by the Occupiers' encampment, which was moved from the city-endorsed park to a more conspicuous and less comfortable location on the cement near the city center for obvious reasons of exposure. Until the Occupants set up camp here, this spot was among the

main hangouts of the homeless. Now they have been additionally displaced, by the Occupation Forces.

It's very hard to win at anything lately. And when I walk by the new site and do my best to scrutinize the Occupiers who are by some reports the vanguard of the populist future, the 99 percent, you know, I see no one who really looks like part of the American middle class, the economically and politically impoverished middle class which by my analysis is the real 99 percent, or at least perhaps the real 90 percent from whom we are still honestly waiting to hear anything besides what we have already heard from its representatives in the Tea Party of No Fine China.