Occupy San Diego: Get Out the Middle-Aged White Women

“THINGS MUST BE REALLY BAD WHEN MIDDLE-AGED WHITE WOMEN MARCH” That was one of the signs I saw at the Occupy San Diego, and I think that to a large extent that one sign sums up a lot of the flavor of the demonstration. I’ve been to other rallies and demonstrations. You tend to see the same folks there, the ones you run into at the organic grocery store. They can usually be broken down into age groups: Lots of college aged kids and the ones with lots of grey in their hair now, the baby boomer Woodstock generation who are old hands at the demonstration thing.

This crowd was different. There were the college kids and the aging hippies, and even the obligatory drum circle and a guy sort of singing and sort of playing a guitar, but the majority of folks there were the one in the middle, in their thirties and forties, giving a normal curve of adult ages. As I said, the sign about the middle-aged white women sort of summed up the crowd. Also, San Diego has a most varied ethnic mix, yet it can remain quite segregated. Rabble rousing rallies are normally populated by white students and those white aging hippies, but this time around I saw a slightly more diverse crowd, more black, Mexican, Filipino folks.

I was there as a participant, believing that big moneyed interests control too much of our politics and that the divide between the wealthy and the rest of us, the 99% figure that has become a buzz word of this campaign, is sinfully widening and is exacerbated by a tax system that taxes them at a rate far lower than the rest of us.

But I am at heart an observer. So I walked up to a lot of folks and asked them why they were there. College age folks universally said that affording school was a big issue with them. The responses I got from older folks centered around corporate greed and its effects on our government. Two folks quoted Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, "We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."

I didn’t do a head count, but figure the crowd was about 2000, pretty large considering that this is San Diego and the event was held during work hours.

Is this a growing viable movement? I hope so. It has a big uphill battle, though. The T party gets candidates elected to offices and is able to stymie legislation. That is because they have the financial backing of the Koch brothers and support from the Fox network. They also get a lot of support from talk radio.

            The Occupy movement will get none of that. But it may succeed because it is, as for the little that I saw of it in San Diego, broad based and diverse. Like they say, we are the 99%.