#1 Son (called home late Saturday afternoon, giddy with excitement): Guess what I'm doing, Mom?
Me: The possibilities are endless. You took a swim in the Hudson?
#1: No, but you are close. We took the Brooklyn Bridge!*
He was not among the dozens arrested**, but his friend Claire was. He will cat-sit for her while she is in jail. Claire is such a med student -- emphasis on the student -- that she made herself a bunch of anatomy flash cards and stuffed them in her bra before the police took her so she could study if she ends up in jail for awhile.
*Apparently there were a number of protests on Friday and Saturday. He was among the group that gathered in Wall Street chanting Greed must go!*** or some such before occupying the Brooklyn-bound lanes of the Bridge.
** Unlike 2004, when he was among the 1,200 or so protesters arrested during the Republican National Convention in NYC (his group was protesting WHINSEC) and spent 40+ hours in Guantanamo on the Hudson. That time he called me on a borrowed cell phone from the middle of Broadway at 29th to say he had been arrested and was waiting to be taken away in a police bus. He was one of the last to be allowed leave the bus-garage-turned-into-a-holding-facility and saw the police spreading rugs and carpets over the oil- and grease-stained concrete floor before admitting the media to view the facility where the protesters had been housed. Because he witnessed that he became part of a class action suit against [city of New York? New York Police Department? I forget]. Somewhere I have a photo I found on the Web at the time, of the protesters lying in the middle of Broadway; #1 is lying at the front of the line.
*** In related news, I recently read The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry, part of which examines (and finds true) the premise that psychopathology may be a distinct competitive advantage to a captain of industry. Based on that I fear that greed ain't goin' away anytime soon.
