Winter in Retreat

Saturday passed with little fanfare. It was a glum day anyway, and few people came to the square. Some rally was planned. They brought their flags and their signs waving them about with vulgar intensity. But they were an un-intimidating crowd. Mostly older folk, hippies and children of the sixties who vaunt themselves as the vanguard of some great civilizational leap into the future. But now they are old and a little frail. The men wear their hair long and the women, short. An apt metaphor for the ontological shift they now foist upon a world reeling with their insanity. The men are emasculated eunuchs and the women, scolding shrews.

Across the street, they are mirrored in the quiet piety of the praying youth. Not many were there, maybe five or six of them.Their signs simply say, “choose life.” They stand quietly at the curb in a kind of silent repose while their opposites growl at them from across the thoroughfare, “Silence is Violence!”

The contrast is difficult to intensify.