Occupation

The Occupy Movement, inspired by Occupy Wall Street, is incredibly inspiring. There’s an Occupy Miami event scheduled for next weekend, but I will be out of town working for The Man.

Otherwise, I would’ve been there.

In lieu of my absence, I will share my demands with you now in the hopes to add my voice to the crowd of, hopefully, very many.

1. End the wars. Bring the troops home. Use a third of all that money we’ll save to give those veterans Dr.-Drew-grade mental health services and Joan-Rivers-caliber medical treatment. Use another third of the money to forgive student loans for teachers, professors, nurses and first responders. Seriously. Just forgive them their federal loans and pay-off any private loans they took out to supplement. If you do this, I don’t even care what happens to the last third of the pot. Buy $16 muffins for real this time. I don’t care.

2. Run for office. Make every vote count. At the core of this movement are incredibly smart people. Smart people that should be in office. People that need to challenge the dumb people – no more walking away from stupidity! My wish for the next stage of this movement is an Occupy The Ballot surge. I would like a real person representing me in local, state and federal politics. Not a millionaire. Not a lawyer. And certainly not someone that only visits Versailles when they need a photo op.

In order to get my wish, we should demand a $10,000 cap on campaign spending and make it illegal to accept donations from corporations, period. Can you imagine how creative a campaign has to be to only spend ten grand? It’ll give them practice when they get to office and have to be frugal with a city’s budget. And how about we count those votes like Facebook: one per person? Abolish the U.S. Electoral College and let the vote of the populace count.

3. Kill the miles. Use the metric system. I’m not kidding. You want to get everyone working again? From street sign makers to car factories to teachers (no doubt having to tutor the entire US population), everyone will benefit with transitioning over to the metric system. We’re the only industrialized country on this system. It’s like we’re those turtles from the Comcast commercials, afraid of going too fast and being in the know. Think of how this small change can save the publishing industry. This would add jobs to the airline industry. Technology companies will have to produce speed radar guns for police departments and Major League Baseball. Most importantly, this would help us communicate with the rest of the world, because, as of right now, when we say “miles,” only Liberia, Burma and Myanmar are listening.