We are the 99%. We are everywhere.

In the fall of 2000 I was visiting my mother in Bayonne Hospital (she had congestive heart failure) while waiting in great anxiety for the Supreme Court ruling on the Florida recount.  When the court ruled that the recount should be stopped, I started to cry.  My mother, very concerned, said “Don’t cry, it’s only an election.”  I responded that it was far more than an election, that the world as we knew it was changed forever.  That may have sounded dramatic back then, but what subsequently ensued after Bush and the Supreme Court stole the presidency from Al Gore has shown my words to be prophetic: wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with hundreds of thousands of deaths, mainly of innocents, the loss of homes and homelands of millions of other innocents, the appointment of even more right-wing judges to the U.S. Supreme Court, the use of rendition and torture by the American government, the imprisonment without trial of hundreds at Guantanamo Bay.  On and on, the evils proliferated.  

My late husband Miguel and I left in 2001 for Italy, as we said we would if Bush were elected (although he wasn’t “elected,” at least not by the people), and returned briefly in 2004 to help in Kerry’s campaign, leaving again for Italy, totally disheartened.   In the years since, I gave up caring, at least about politics.  Americans, particularly younger Americans, appeared to have no interests beyond Lindsay Lohan, the Kardashians, and acquiring the latest iPhone or iPad --the Steve Jobs “i” generation.  Nothing after that stirred my former interest in politics, not even the election of Obama "Yes, we can" (slogan without substance).  Wall Street was, and still is, his major source of political contributions.  

Two months ago today it came back, a belief that there is life after the Tea Party, that Americans, at least a subset of Americans, care about others, not just themselves, and are willing to do something about it.  It was Occupy Wall St.  That’s when I began my political blog, and also when I tried to get others in New York to offer up their homes for one or two nights a week, to give the occupiers a warm place to sleep, a hot shower, and a good meal before they return to Zuccotti Park to freeze their butts off on our behalf.  (On our behalf if you're part of the 99%.  If you're part of the 1% and reading here, I hope you're Warren Buffet, or at least agree with him, that you should pay a higher percentage of taxes than those who have much less.)  Winter without central heating in New York is not fun, and those who think the occupiers are just cranky college kids with nothing better to do than annoy Mayor Bloomberg should stop watching Fox TV.  

This morning a good friend called to let me know the occupiers had been thrown out of Zuccotti Park, and my initial reaction was the same as it had been eleven years ago:  I cried.  I stopped quickly though, knowing instinctively that it's different this time. The occupiers are not going away.  They’ll return in even greater numbers, if not to Zuccotti Park, than to demonstrations in New York, Washington, Oakland, Portland, Albany, as well as in Madrid, Paris, London, Brussels, Rome, against greed, against wars, against the inhumanity of poverty and hunger.  My friend suggested we camp out in his backyard in Staten Island so we can build up our immune systems for the days ahead.  I hope he was kidding but his point is valid.  If I want Occupy to succeed I have to be willing, as I was in the days of Vietnam, to show my face.  Writing about Occupy is important but being there, at the demonstrations, holding a placard, is in the end the only way to let the 1% know we’ve had enough.  I hope those of you who agree will join me.  


"You cannot evict an idea whose time has come. We are the 99%. We are everywhere."