99 versus 1

We have passed a little bit of water under the keel since I last posted, and by all rights I should catch up on events that have taken place in order since I last left off. And I probably will, eventually; at the moment, I just wanted to make a brief, topical note on some musings that came to mind this weekend at a yacht club event we are attending.

This is going on during the Occupy Wall Street protests, of course, and our club event is just down the street from one, so to speak, at Bell Harbor Marina on the Seattle waterfront. Occupy Seattle is about six blocks up, in Westlake Park. Mandy and I wandered by there this morning. It has been looking emptier and emptier each time I have seen it recently. The last time, there were more cops than protesters. This morning, a handful of protesters, looking cold and miserable, and one officer idling in a patrol car. Apparently, the threat has dissipated.

It got me thinking, though, about how it must seem on the face of it that anyone belonging to a yacht club, and owning a boat, is certainly in or approaching that top one percent, wealthy folks with cash to burn. But that's not our club; the dues, obviously, are reasonable enough for us to afford, and we're not winning any prizes in the economic rat race. Just about everyone else in the club is blue-collar or retired blue-collar. Our 33 footer is in about the upper middle of the pack in this crowd. No mega-yachts or billionaires here.

Yet we're at a marina this weekend that clearly caters to such folks. Bell Harbor is charging $1.35 a foot at a time of year when most places are closer to $.50. The marina is run by the Port of Seattle, which is who runs Shilshole, our home port, but the differences couldn't be more stark. At Shilshole, the restrooms are old, dingy, and in need of re-grouting. The toilet paper is the thin tissue paper stuff that comes in massive rolls that they probably bring in by the fork-lift load. The showers are equally dingy, the water takes forever to warm up, it dribbles out, and you pay a quarter for every two minutes for the privilege.

Here at Bell Harbor, they have real toilet paper, the showers are free, separate, hot, and sparkling. For the first time in my entire life, I took a shower in a place with a gauge that shows the water temperature. There's a video screen with tourist information at the head of the dock. Obviously this isn't to cater to the average joe; and indeed, our tiny little boats are dwarfed by some of the mega-yachts in here right now.

But what I was thinking was, if they introduced such amenities at Shilshole, they would quickly be abused or defiled. The toilet paper would cost them an arm and a leg to keep up. Free unlimited showers would mean someone forgetting to turn off the spigot and similarly costing them a lot of money. Some kid would break the video screen. And it would take an army to keep it all clean and shiny.

That's not because us 99 percenters up at Shilshole are willfully abusive; it's just what happens when a lot of people are using pretty nice things. They just don't get kept up as much as is needed. If you wanted to have such nice stuff, it would become cost-prohibitive... it couldn't be done, even with all the wealth of the one percent. There are just too many of us, and not enough stuff to go around.

There is definitely a problem with the distribution of wealth in this country, but I don't think that spreading it around more evenly is necessarily going to raise our standards of living all that much. What the solution is, I don't know. I am not sure OWS does, either.