Peace Protest

Two roads intersected many years ago, making four corners and a small town, charming and intimate, called Delmar. They have two pizza shops there, a Chinese restaurant, an eclectic book store, a market of the regular kind (before we became behemoths), a trendy coffee shop, a wellness clinic for after we became behemoths, and a peace store, Who would have ever thought we'd need a place to purchase peace. But we do, don't we.

There's also an island, of sorts, a tiny nook of land in the midst of the intersection, with park benches and a big clock, so that everyone can tell the times. And the times they are still a changin', for at 5:00 P.M. on every Monday afternoon since 2002, sandwhiched between the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions, a group calling itself Bethlehem Neighbors For Peace meets here, at the concrete island and its outlaying corners, to demonstrate against war. They're mostly older men in beards, and older women in sunglasses. Mostly. They hold signs of the liberal kind, some of them encouraging rush-hour traffic, such as it can be in Delmar, to honk for peace. There was a lot of honking, for Delmar is a liberal town, and not without money or education. All told there may have been fifty peace-loving, well-educated Delmar liberals there.

Opposing them was a smaller group of maybe ten stalwart individuals, led by a former Marine biker of the Nomad clan, apparently. He was youngish, in his thirties I would guess, and wore a digital desert cammo scarf pulled tightly over his head and tied in back of his neck, in the fashion of pirates. I immediately loved him, for he was sunbeaten and weathered. Gritty. He walked with a hard edge of menace, very confident despite the superior numbers arrayed against him. I would most certainly want him with me in a firefight. He brought some fresh-faced, pimply boys with him, college Republican types. I would most certainly NOT want them with me. There were also a few grim faced older men holding flags proudly, glaring across the street at a group of smiling liberals holding their own flags. The flags all looked the same to me but the groups seemed to differ over the fate of "the troops." While both sides held placards admonishing the rest of us to support the troops, one side of the street thought it best to bring them home while the other side wanted to leave them where they were. It all got very muddled, as reflected by the conservatives' signs: "REALLY Support the Troops" - "We Did Pack Our Bags!" - We are NOT BNFP!" The lone woman in the war group proudly held a sign that said "I married a soldier." Now, I've thought long and hard on these things and I still can't tell what these folks actually wanted!

So... sixty people milled about for one hour out of twenty-four, one day out of seven, on a cute but insignificant corner in a politically insignificant town, with most everyone taking credit for the same-sounding car horns, all splashed about with the same Stars and Stripes cologne, probably enjoying the same pizza afterwards.... and this is a threat to whom? We know it's not stopped any wars, and we also know it probably hasn't started any new ones. So what is it?

Well, to a curious outsider, it looks a lot like group masturbation: feels good, but no reproduction.

I sipped my boutique coffee silently, watching all, and then walked slowly back to my car, whistling the Star Spangled Banner.