Occupying My Parents' Basement

I wish I had some funny, anecdotal way to get into This, but I don’t. The following is going to be about the Occupy Movement in general, Occupy Portland in partic...

Wait, WAIT!!! I do, I do have a funny, anecdotal way to get into This:

4:15 in the morning. Sunday morning. 13th of November.

There I was in my parent’s basement, in my PJs.

Yeah, I’m 27 years old. Yeah, I live in my parents' basement. Yeah, they live in a multi-million dollar home that isn’t just in Lake Oswego, Oregon, it’s on Lake Oswego, Oregon. Lake Oswego, Oregon. a.k.a. “Lake No Negro,” a.k.a. “The Land of Oz,” a.k.a. the richest suburb in the Portland-Metro Area.

Anyways, there I was ready to start my morning stretching/exercise routine:

I’d prepared the juice I always drink while stretching (OJ cut with water and Emergen-C).

I’d angled the downstairs television into optimal viewing position.

Yeah, my parents have a downstairs television, and a mid-level one, and an upstairs one, and another downstairs, and one in my little sister’s room, and....

I turned on the TV hoping to find out whether or not the Ducks had beaten Stanford the night before, but instead of being on its usual channel 735 (ESPN, HD) my parent’s cable-box was set to channel 702 (ABC, also HD).

*Breaking News*

The Occupy Portland camp had not been broken up like Mayor Sam Adams promised!!!

Now, I want you to let your own personal reaction to that news wash over you. Get frustrated. Get excited. Get whatever you got back when that was the news. Heck, get whatever.

   

Actually, scratch “whatever” off your list.

If your reaction to the Occupy Movement has been some kind of indifference then you probably need to go to a hospital: Some vital part of you is dead and/or dying.

Don’t believe me?

Think I’m being melodramatic?

            Or Captain Obvious?
 

How about this: The Occupy Movement isn’t just protesting corporate greed:

Or government hoo-ha twaddling:

 

It’s protesting the way of life of any/all those of us who’re doing well enough Right Now to not be a part of the Occupy Movement.

There.

I said it.

My new definition of the 1%.

Less this:

More this:

 
(For some reason, my computer won’t let me upload images I download from facebooooook; I wanted a picture of myself for the above and apologize for the somewhat shameless mirror-mirror maneuver I decided to go with instead.)

And you know what? Me and my would-be-ESPN-watching/PJ-wearing/stretching/exercising/juice-drinking/Lake-O-with-parents-living/somewhat-gainfully-employed/health-insured/college-educated/pretty-d@mn-Happy self actually thinks the Occupy Movement is onto something.

And not because I think it’s “good.” (I don’t).

Or because I think it’s going to “work.” (What do we even mean by “work” any more?)

Or because I think it’s got a “clear message.” (It doesn’t, at least not in terms of being able to articulate the kind of concrete desires that we seem to want from others, e.g., "I want X")

Or because I think it’s going to find the kind of charismatic leader necessary to unify/organize it in such a way that news reporters stop asking stupid questions of hapless-weirdos and pundits just shut the f*ck up.

I think the Occupy Movement is onto something because it shows us something true about ourselves.

And by “ourselves” I mean my new definition of the 1%.

And by “something true” I mean something that most of us don’t like seeing when we look in the mirror and say, “Mirror mirror...”

Or something we don’t want to hear from others when we ask them, “Do these jeans make a$$ look fat?”

What the mirror is showing us isn’t what we want to see.

What our friend is telling us isn’t something we want to hear.

And what are we being shown/told?

Occupy Portland has shown/told us that we have such a substantial population of crazy, drug-addled, homeless people in our city that our iteration of Occupy basically couldn’t do anything more than merely admirably try and fail to take care of said crazy, drug-addled homeless people.

            Anyone who saw the Occupy Portland camp on the news (me, you, everyone else we know), anyone who went into the camp for any period of time (not me, admittedly), couldn’t help but see who/what was there.
            Even Occupy Portland apologists, people who say things like, “But it wasn’t all homeless, crazy, drug-addled people! There were families there, too!” are basically admitting, via good, old-fashioned de-Nile--

--the truthfulness of what Occupy Portland has shown us, namely, that there are people living in the United States of America, the most prosperous nation in the history of the world, who are not being taken care of.

We sure-as-sh*t aren’t taking care of them.

Nobody else appears to be taking care of them.

They sure-as-shei$$e aren’t taking care of themselves.

Like it or not, this is the Truth.

Like it or not, when Occupy Portland finally got disbanded in its camp-form, all the crazy, drug-addled homeless people that made Occupy Portland such a volatille, ineffective iteration of Occupy, i.e., which made Occupy Portland what it was, didn’t go nowhere.

They just went somewhere else.

            They went back to Burnside.
            They went back to that three-four block radius around Pioneer Square.
            They went back to...   

Well, at least they didn't go back to Lake Oswego, Oregon.