Yes that's right. OWS is currently manifesting itself as a 33 year old homeless, indigent young woman with a masters degree and no ambition whatsoever. Unless you count "never having to work" as an ambition.

And she is lounging on my couch.

When she kept asking for monetary handouts we finally said no. But "if you NEED a place to live you can come live with us." Never thinking she would actually take us up on it. But the grasshopper has come home to roost, living with the ants she is currently protesting.

As Pulitzer-Prize winning author David Mamet points out, "the Liberal young are taught to shun work. They, like Marx and his beneficiaries, the French, find it an exercise both odious and superfluous." He adds, "the current economic jollity leaves the protected Liberal kid in a more extensive bind: unlike those of the lower or working classes, he will never dream of setting his hand to actual labor. He will not, that is, learn to be an electrician, a plumber, a firefighter, et cetera, and avail himself of the universal need for these services and their like to supply his living."

My step-daughter went from a Liberal Arts degree at U.C. Davis to a Masters degree at Washington University in St. Louis in Social Work. Unlike myself and thousands of others, she chose to go deeply into debt to get a masters degree from which she will most likely never make a living. Her father paid for her first degree allowing her hours of leisure that her less fortunate classmates could only dream of as they waited tables and washed dishes. 

And now under an economy firmly owned by the current President for whom she voted, she and many of her classmates are unemployed. She passes her time watching bad T.V. and movies, texting, making art, cooking vegan food and watching womens Roller Derby on her computer. She announced at dinner on Friday night that "if I never had to work a day in my life again, I wouldn't," and certainly there seems to be a good chance of that. Watching her use glue and scissors reminds me of my son when he was 6; having passed her adult life in a herd mentality within a bubble she is completely unprepared for the Real World.

You know, that place that expects you to set your alarm and get up and go to work? No, she's not quite sure what that whole thing is about but is pretty sure it is highly overestimated.

She is 33 years old going on 13. 

She doesn't wash her sheets. She leaves dishes, books, papers, clothes all over the house. She stays up all night and sleeps all morning. She lets her dog out of her room for her father to let out and to feed. She cries when her father finally tells her to clean up her shit.

The only time she had a meltdown with me was when she told me matter-of-factedly that her brother was "lucky" he had a job.

"Lucky?" I said, "Luck has nothing to do with it. He and his wife have worked 24/7 for 2 years straight to make their food truck business profitable. They work, they're not lucky." She burst into tears and slammed her (our) door behind her. My husband said, oh let's make the peace, show some compassion.

"I'm showing her plenty of compassion," I retorted. "She is living for free in my house." And I headed to work. 

Columnist Marybeth Hicks is surprisingly accurate on her take of the current OWS person lounging on my couch.  She states that since their parents obviously did not teach their children the following things, she will:

• Life isn't fair. Or as Mick Jagger said, "You can't always get what you want."
• Nothing is free. Protesting with signs that seek free college degrees and free healthcare make you look like idiots because colleges and hospitals don't operate on rainbows and sunshine. The 53% of taxpaying Americans owe you neither a degree nor an annual physical.
• Your word is your bond. When you demonstrate to eliminate student loan debt, you are advocating precisely the lack of integrity you decry in others. No one forces you to borrow money. Being a college student is not a state of victimization, it's a privilege.
• There are reasons you haven't found jobs. The truth? Your tattooed necks, gauged ears, facial piercings and dirty dreadlocks. Occupy reality: Only 4 percent of college graduates are out of work. If you are among that 4 percent, find a mirror. It's not them. It's you.

She just summed up our particular OWSer: tattooed over 90% of her body and pierced so that she couldn't even get a job at Starbucks which makes you take out your piercings and cover up your tattoo's with makeup. She believes that by virtue of being born, she deserves "free" everything.

While I suffer profound outrage at the Wall Street Bailouts [to the point of panic attacks] that President Obama chose to perform and having done my research reading The Big Short and Boomerang by  Michael Lewis,  I do not feel the need to embrace Socialism nor Anarchism. Nobody is too big to fail and Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley should have crashed and burned as consequences for their behavior [which is the norm under the Free Market system] instead of robbing innocent taxpayers and putting our entire fiscal system at risk.

I too am making myself heard on this issue. But not by lying on the couch.