Julia Botello, 85 - Daily Mail

Inspired by the Arab Spring and the now global Occupy movement, I went to Occupy North County out here in southern California on Saturday, October 15, 2011.  As I was coming up to the intersection of Encinitas Boulevard and 101 where people were gathering, a pickup pulled up just in front of me on the street and parked.  A man in his late seventies or early eighties got out of the driver’s side.  It was his wife that I watched more closely as she stepped out of the passenger side and onto the sidewalk a few feet in before me.  Like her husband, she might have been in her early eighties, her white hair shining in the sun.  She wore make-up and was comfortably dressed in the clean, newish clothes indicative of the middle class.  Her back was rounded with age and her pale, liver-spotted hands held tightly to a large, bright pink sign on which was written “CORPORATIONS SOLD US OUT!” in thick black ink.  She hobbled toward the protest on the sidewalk, her husband tottering around the front of the pickup to meet her.  The elderly couple concentrated on the ground  in front of them to be sure of their footing, but their heads lifted in unison when a cop car rolled slowly down the street toward the gathering.  The old woman let out an exasperated breath and said, “There go the fuzz already.”