I think it’s great to see so many transient kids with tattooed faces and dogs with handkerchief collars out in support of soccer moms. If you think lazy street kids and homeless people somehow lead the Occupy Wall Street movement, you are entirely wrong. How could they?
How long have stoners, transients, homeless and the plethora of other disheveled and unkempt members of society been around? And why are they finally setting up camps in public parks and getting away with it? What made them organize across the whole nation? The fact is, they didn’t. They may have a large showing at occupation sites, but they are not the support of the movement.
The occupation tent city in San Francisco is covered in slogans like “Corporations are not people!” and “End the Fed!” Occupy SF is indeed a tent city of falling apart tents, transient kids with dogs and homeless guys loudly proclaiming “civil annoyance!” at all hours of the night. But it is also so much more. You can see who the camp really benefits by who shows up for a few minutes to unload water and food from their 2008 Kia Sorentos: soccer moms.
Why would soccer moms be dropping off food for a group of transient stoners while their children clamor in the backseat to see the funny looking people? It’s not because those mothers wish they hadn’t gotten married and had kids. It is not because they wish they were living in the mud with a Grateful Dead hoodie blackened by dirt. It is because the transients can do what the mothers cannot: sit in a park and demand the end to corporate rule in America’s political process.
Families cannot move onto the steps of City Hall to protest. Kids need to go to school. They need food, beds and blankets. Occupational protests are therefore not something a family, or soccer moms, can do.
The sentiments of Occupy are not the sentiments of a bunch of lazy street kids. I know because I’ve lived with them, minus the begging part. The dynamic that actually comes up with all these travel kids, their  five-stringed guitars spray-painted with anarchy signs and holey jeans covered in black patches, is that they are there to do what the families cannot.
The whole reason this protest started was because everyday people, the ones who had jobs and were buying houses, lost their jobs and houses because big banks could and did get away with shoddy business deals that screwed over the whole economy. Those people, the everyday ones, still have children to feed, to take to school, to buy clothes, pens and books for and don’t have time to sit in a park demanding accountability from the banks. So they cook up a big pot of chili, drive it down, and hand it over to some kid who offers to carry it from their car to the kitchen at the camp.
Now I’m back in Santa Rosa, waking up at 6:30 a.m. to be in calculus at 7:30 a.m. and I’m sleeping in front of Santa Rosa City Hall. Not because I lost my house and I have to flip burgers, but because I can. Because I don’t have to get my kids ready for school.