Occupy This: My Demands!

Over the past month, we have been treated to news stories about “Occupy Wall Street”. Depending upon your point of view, “Occupy Wall Street” is either a rag-tag band of naive young people trying to stick it to the MAN or a bunch of smelly hippies. My bet is on the smelly hippies, but I grew up during the 60’s and the 70’s when everyone was trying to “change the world; rearrange the world” to quote either Crosby, Stills, Nash, or Young (I think it was the least interesting one of the bunch: Graham Nash). So forgive me if I yawn about this movement because it reminds me of a title of an Elton John song, “I’ve Seen That Movie, Too”.

The last “populist” movement to spring up was “The Tea Party” which was ignored for the first several moments of its life and then finally called racist. Generally, the Mainstream Media has given “Occupy Wall Street” the kid gloves treatment, which is reserved for only the most precious of movements even though there is about as many African-Americans in “Occupy Wall Street” as there are in the “The Tea Party”.

So far, “Occupy Wall Street” is upset about a lot of things, mainly that they have to pay back their student loans. Somehow, this is the fault of Wall Street. The last time I checked, there wasn’t a single Wall Street executive sent to private homes to drag students out to private colleges and make them major in English.

They, of course, have a lot of other demands and speaking of 99% that is just about the amount that is silly. The other 1% is simply delusional. Such as having a minimum wage of $20 an hour, begin a fast track to end the fossil fuel economy (man, they got this car that runs entirely on water…), 1 trillion dollars in infrastructure, and Skittles for everybody!

Last week, at the Republican debate, one of the reporters asking the questions seemed to take “Occupy Wall Street” very seriously. This caused me to reflect upon my own life. I think my problem in life is that I have never occupied anything and made a demand. So in the spirit of “Occupy Wall Street, I have decided to list my demands. Right on!

• All women should be hot and laugh at my jokes.

• Speaking of women, no women play by play announcer for football games. I'm looking at you, ESPN.


• When you purchase a cable TV package, you should be able to pick and choose only the channels you want. That means, if I don’t want forty Spanish channels, 13 “music” channels that don’t feature music but people I never heard of cursing at each other, or 16 cooking channels, I shouldn’t have to pay for them.

• Preachers should stop wearing those microphones that make them look like an operator of the phone company. If the label microphone was good enough for Peter and Paul, it should be good enough for them.


• Department stores should carry shoes sizes of all men. Including me (I have small feet. Shut up.)


• The phrase: “You see, what had happen was” will be outlawed.


• Starbucks will change their cup sizes from “Tall”, “Grande”, and “Venti” to “Small”, “Medium”, and “Large”.


• The latest start time for a baseball game: 4:00.


• The immediate destruction of anything that resembles something Ed Hardy might make.


• Just one tattoo per person.


• Less Stevie B’s – More Captain D’s!