The Sardinian Occupation of a Buick

I don’t know who Murphy was, but his laws are more inescapable than any passed by the Supreme Court and require no gargantuan army to enforce them.

As we prepared to leave Jan. 16, the car, big enough for the trip, succumbed and decided at the last minute to have problems. A much smaller Buick appeared to do its part in the newest American Revolution — what’s more American than a slightly small Buick?

It took a shoe horn and grease to load five young idealists, enough ideals to stock Wal-Mart, if Wal-Mart carried such things, the gear required to be homeless for two days and an overweight journalist into it. Undaunted, the Buick smiled and departed on its journey to deliver a heaping, overflowing dose of Americans and their stuff to the streets of the most important political capital of the world.

The small Buick and the overflowing amounts of patriotism it contained defied the laws of physics for almost 600 miles, 950 pounds of — insert smelly word here — in an 800 pound sack. Murphy could not fit inside, but was content to ride atop the car, kind of like the dog of a certain candidate who wishes to be the next prince of Pennsylvania Avenue. As the miles passed below, the rain and cold descended from above. What else could be expected or be more appropriate for such an adventure?

The train ride into the city of Washington D.C. was enlightening as people jockeyed to avoid Americans who would dare come to the nation’s capital to exercise their American rights and the signs they carried. The dash across the city through the rain, intended to dodge the drops falling into the freezing temperatures, was doomed. By the time the tent was up, the rain’s victory was nearly complete; except the spirits of the group gleamed through the cold, rainy, predawn, unimpeded.

The march to occupy Congress started at 9 and several hundred protesters shouted their way down Pennsylvania Avenue, surrounded by bicycle cops, motorcycle cops, cops in cars, cops on foot, cops on horses and cops driving vans and buses.

As the morning moved along some were arrested, but their reason for being there was not diminished nor denied. Several hundred turned into 1,500 by lunch, of course by then most of the media had returned to their rooms to write unflattering pieces about the protesters and their numbers while drinking martinis and eating Grey Poupon on imported salmon sandwiches.

At 6:30 the number had risen to more than 3,000 and with great purpose and a verbal power, adequate for changing the world, they marched to the Supreme Court. The media sipped their drinks and told stories of the wars they almost died in as thousands of average Americans owned the streets of our Capitol. “Who’s streets, our streets” echoed between the high-rise symbols of our freedom and might as they marched toward the White House.

Thousands of Citizens arrived at the White House accompanied by hundreds of police officers and a generous amount of riot gear that waited in the wings. In the end it was not needed. The only thing missing from this, the most important and decidedly possible volatile time of the day, was the media. I’m sure the hotels along Pennsylvania Avenue loaded up expense accounts with designer beer and expensive food as the reporters prepared stories about what had happened instead of what was happening. I guess it isn’t true that you get what you pay for, or maybe the news industry got exactly what they wanted and not one word more.

After someone was spotted peeking from a window of the White House, the protest, hoping it was the president, retook the streets and moved back toward Congress for an occu-party, complete with pizza and dancing. The march had taken all day and had controlled more than six miles of streets in the most influential city of the world.

If I have a war story to tell, it’ll be of a return trip, in an occupied Buick containing a young, Afghanistan veteran with a tear on his cheek, who, after laying his life at the altar of freedom, has now laid his tears below the symbols of that freedom, containing a soft spoken Christian from the mountains of Georgia on a quest to decide his level of commitment, containing a slightly psychotic, conservative hippie, struggling to find his place in this world, containing an understated bookseller with no delusions of but a firm possession of grandeur and an ingrained ability to lead, containing the Buick’s master, a unassuming Massachusettsian who has the capability of being one of the future princes of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

This slightly overweight journalist with bad knees who struggled to keep up has always been proud to be an American but never more proud than he is today. I salute and will always be proud to be counted among the Sardinians.