Occupiers: Not just students
????Who are these people? Lots of earnest college kids, let's start with that. ("They're not all white," I remarked to a colleague on an early visit to Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan. "No," she said, "but they all look like they have liberal arts degrees.") When my boss sent me downtown, he specifically told me not to spend all my time talking to Oberlin students, so I'll tell you about just one that I met in D.C., Sam Jewler. He was sitting outside a Starbucks (SBUX) on McPherson Square, in his red plaid shirt and his green watch cap, with his coffee and his MacBook Pro, trying to stay dry. It was the morning of the big East Coast storm and while it wasn't snowing yet, it was windy, wet and bitter cold; I was so chilled I was shaking, and I'd only been out there a couple of hours.
????"It's not illegitimate for a lot of us to be college students," Jewler said. "If you look at what happened in Cairo, that was largely college students who graduated and realized there wasn't anything for them. That's kind of what's happening here." Except that that's not really Jewler's story. He graduated in December, moved back in with his parents to save money while trying to launch a career in journalism, and was lucky to land a coveted paid internship at Washingtonian magazine. But the Occupy movement beckoned, and just last week, inspired by what he viewed as historic events and too opinionated by now to do the "false objectivity" thing, Jewler quit his paying gig ("yeah, it's pretty weird") to help launch the Occupied Washington Times. He sleeps in a tent now. With winter coming, he's been climbing into his sleeping bag every night with all his clothes still on, but he's waking up every morning, he told me, feeling "happy to be here."
????Who else did I meet? A young man reading Kafka on the sidewalk in Boston; a drifter in D.C. named Pockets—19 years old, no plans for college—who told me, "I hate money. It's good when you have it but I often don't;" Willard Lake, 49, also in D.C., an artist who showed me one of his anti-war paintings and said he'd trade it for "an iPad 2 and an iPhone, with service," and afterwards bummed ten bucks off me for a bus ticket to Baltimore; Malcolm Brown, an 81-year-old Korean War vet and retired cop who was sitting on a bench in Denver's City Center Park the day after police arrested 17 protesters, holding a sign that read "Corporations are not people" and "Money is not free speech;" Joel Haughee, a former SDS member from Indiana, living in Oakland now, who told me he drifted away from the anti-war movement when it turned violent in '68 and worries now that the Occupy movement could come similarly unraveled if the anarchists have their way.
????My favorite was Samantha Robles, goes by Sam: 20-something, long black hair with bangs, "Fight Your Demons" tattooed on her chest—a smart, assertive kid who said she didn't go to college because she didn't have the money and she didn't want the debt. Sam left her home in Florida ("I needed a change") and made her way to Boston. She found a restaurant job and a bed in a rooming house. When she heard about Occupy Boston, she kept her job but gave up her bed and relocated to Dewey Square. "I know it's hard if you have a family," she said. "You can't come and stay here when you have responsibilities and things like that, when you're so in the system with your life. But I have the freedom to be here and help as much as I can. I'd kind of feel like a jerk if I didn't."
????Sam's tent is on "Weird Street," a section of the encampment fronting Atlantic Avenue. People driving by late at night after the bars close sometimes roll down their windows and yell "Get a job!" "I don't understand how you could shame people for wanting to better the lives of other people," Sam said. "The things that we want aren't just for us, it's for everyone. It's equality for everyone. So you don't have to worry when you wake up, 'How am I going to feed my kids? How am I going to feed myself? What if it rains, where am I going to sleep?' I wouldn't wish that on anyone. I wouldn't wish that on the people who yell at us."
