When Blue Skies… The Search For An Elusive Peace

 

 

 

Sure blue is a nice warm color, sky blue, blue eyes crying in the rain or not, blue skies over Dover once the now forgotten time-limited battles were over, done. It was on such a blue day that I first saw the symbol above, the dove of peace all etched in black and white as if to say that on the questions of war and peace the issue was black or white, no shadings, no slipping over into thoughts of troop-less drone warfare, no quick escalations and then out, out leaving behind that little problem of fire and brimstone done to some forsaken villages or national treasures, no quick bombing runs and then home for a cocktail and a night of gin rummy (Hiroshima was a quick raid, remember, remember the carnage seventy years later).

Saw a fistful of dovish flags all white and black coming at me during the Honk Parade (for those who are not in the know that is a now classic fall event around Boston which has featured every possible odd-ball, good odd-ball, musical assemblage complete with homemade, makeshift costumes, jugglers, stilt-walkers, drifters, grifters, smugglers and I do not know what else) come storming down on me and I was forced, forced I tell you, to watch and clap my hands along with many others on the parade route.     

That storming down is a bit of hyperbole if anything a gentle storm blowing good breezes but here is the point. I had opposed the Iraq wars, I and II, opposed plenty of other American adventures since my own Vietnam War days when I like those black-etched flag-flying Veterans For Peace got “religion” about the rawness of American foreign policy and the military power that carried out that policy to the horror of a candid world. So sure I would march in Washington, on the Common in Boston, maybe take flyer out in the Bay Area, maybe too give a few bucks when the bucket got passed around, maybe speak from some open mic platform about the evils I knew of war, and of the necessity of opposition but I had played the lone wolf, the lone scout but that day I resolved to look into what these guys, mainly guys reflecting ancient past wars and who fought them, were about, why that flurry of flags sent a message to my brain that kindred were about the land.