Some day Occupy Wall Street
protestors will Occupy a Boat. I mean that in a
good way. I think some actually will buy boats or
charter them and they will love every minute on
the water.
They will be like the hair down to
here hippies of the 1960s who quit drugs, washed
their hair and found a job and earned their own
financial success.
Fast-forward forty years from
today. I can see some former Occupiers anchored up
and enjoying the views and breezes with their
spouses on a fly bridge. They will remember, not
fondly, the lice and lethargy of 2011 when home
was a public park that smelled like an outhouse,
where drums pounded, vuvuzela horns squawked, and
people chanted stupidity: "We WE …are ARE …the THE
…99 Percent."
Remember, for every action there is
a reaction.
Maybe one of the new one percenters
will be the young man Conan O'Brien joked about.
He proposed to his girlfriend, "Will you occupy my
parents' basement with me until I get a job?"
Well, it's a start, if his parents
are okay with that. Why not? Up to now they've
given him everything he ever asked for including
paying for his PhD in Postmodern Know Nothing
Studies where he learned that others owed him a
comfortable living and health care, too. It's a
human right, don't you know.
Yeah, you know this story.
Eventually the parents kick them out of the
basement and the young couple applies for jobs.
They don't put Zuccotti Park on their resumes.
Most of their former comrades leave
Zuccotti Park when the first cold arrives. A few
dirty and disheveled deadbeats keep on banging
drums, blowing smoke, and stinking up the
neighborhood.
After a year or so of this
businesses and residents of the neighborhood pack
up and leave the city. So New York City's Mayor
for Life Bloomberg agrees that if the protestors
would please leave the park he will let them
Occupy empty office buildings in Lower Manhattan.
Meanwhile, our young couple from
the park earn enough to pay rent and buy a used
car and they feel better about themselves. They
get promotions and raises from time to time so on
special occasions they agree to Occupy a
restaurant and actually pay for dinner and tip the
server.
Yep, our couple has a couple of
kids and when the little ones are toddlers the
family auto takes them all to the Florida coast
and they all Occupy a beach. They build sand
castles together, periodically applying sunscreen
to pink faces and reminding the little ones not to
leave their Kit Kat wrappers in the sand.
They Occupy a dolphin-cruise
tourist boat and see bottlenose dolphins surfing
the boat's waves and their kids are just thrilled.
"You know," she says to the man she married, once
a boy with a PhD, "wouldn't it be great if we had
our own boat and could go on dolphin cruises all
the time?"
See. This is how it happens.
They get the boat. It's great but
soon they realize it's too small so they get a
bigger boat. And the kids invite their school
friends to get pulled on the big ski tube with
them and they are far and away the most popular
kids in their classes.
Everybody works and studies hard.
Then one year, before their teenagers leave for
college to prepare for corporate jobs, they decide
the time is right to charter a spacious yacht and
cruise the beautiful Southwest Florida coast for a
whole week.
Wow. This is a boat they could
actually, you know, Occupy. It has indoor
plumbing, clean linens, comfy beds, heat and air
conditioning, everything they need but not drums
or vuvuzela horns. The only chant is the
put-you-to-sleep charm of the boat's engines.
Temperatures are just right. The
Gulf ICW is glassy smooth. Dolphins perform.
Ospreys plunge-dive for small fish then eat their
meals, guardedly, at the very top of bare trees.
Flocks of pelicans fly by in formation. Herons and
egrets peck in the shallows for worms and minnows.
Once, cruising along, our couple
detect the slightly off-putting whiff of something
from Bird Island. They look at each other, both
reminded of the same thing, and keep cruising into
the fresh air.
That night, anchored up, the family
kicks back and takes in the views and breeze on
the bridge. The parents tell their teens about
Zuccotti Park and they offer some parental words
of wisdom, something about always striving to be
in the top one percent.