What are the signs of our times? Well, here are a few I’ve seen in Michiana recently: “Instead of War, Invest in People”; “Weapons of Mass Distraction”; “There is No Good Reason for a War in Iraq”; “No War for Oil” – that one depressingly dusted off from what I’ve heard referred to, also depressingly, as the First Gulf War; and then I’ve seen in the newspaper its cheeky reincarnation: signs with cartoon images of Bush and Cheney wearing wet, black mustaches with the slogan, “Got Oil?” I am collecting these signs, keeping track. These are signs of hope that more and more Americans, like most world citizens, desire a peaceful solution to the crisis in Iraq.
Here’s my sign story. Over Christmas, we visited friends in St. Louis and were amazed to find block after city block with houses that had signs staked in their yards declaring “War on Iraq? Not in our Names.” After having spent weeks shouting back at the radio and shaking newspapers in disbelief, I felt a bit more sane, and in good company. We spoke with the printer and had 200 signs sent up to South Bend, and now most of them are staked out on lawns and propped up in windows around town. When folks stop in front of our house to read our signs, I feel something close to hope.
Last Saturday, over 500 people crammed shoulder-to-shoulder into a South Bend church for a public “Music for Peace” event and march. Here’s another sign of the times I saw there: “Don’t Attack Iraq; Babies Live There.” At last Saturday’s peace event, everyone was watching the babies in the crowd – beaming at one pink-buntinged infant swaying in her father’s arms to the rolling voices of the gospel choir. There were kvetching babies, nursing babies, grinners and gooey droolers; twin toddlers in stiff snow pants circling each other in a staggering dance at the back of the room to music that carried both fear and hope.
Besides babies, there were high school students in showy letter jackets, college students and grade-schoolers, older couples in tidy, matching parkas – all of our bodies serving as signs of the way information, ideas, and hope spreads, as someone in the PTO shares news of the peace march with other parents, and they spread the news to workplaces, to libraries and grocery stores, from students to teachers to book groups to community centers – more and more voices in a global chorus that seems increasingly difficult to ignore.
For those many of us who have marched on Washington, this Michiana procession was quite a different animal. There was no wild chanting; no towering, surreal Bread and Puppet creations; no street theater. Our short march was quiet, solemn, as though pitched to the bagpipe dirge we’d heard in the church as we set out on the march, its high keening melody and resolute drone exactly in tune with the marchers. As we walked through the snow, my daughters and their friend struggled earnestly to hold their sign straight against choppy currents of wind. But cars honked to us in encouragement, and we exclaimed at our numbers, stretching for many blocks, several people wide. It gave me hope.
On our kitchen windowsill, with its desolate backdrop of frozen tree limbs and frosted fencing, our kindergartner is growing in a recycled cookie tin a green bean plant, which now, improbably, sports a bean the size of a snip of embroidery floss, and has just popped out two more cheerful purple flowers. The plant holds all the promise of the future, of spring, of hope. I hope there will not be a war. But, of course, I do not fool myself into thinking my hope feels exactly like the hope of the residents of Baghdad, who also hope there will not be a war. Do you remember how, after the eerie empty sky days following 9-11, all of our heads tipped skyward in fear every time we heard a buzz? Multiply that fear by as many times as your heart can take, and you’ll have a tiny glimpse into the daily life of the already beleaguered citizens of Iraq, for whom any buzz on the horizon might signal the fiery end.
Here’s another sign of the times – the words of Dr. Martin Luther King: “There comes a time when silence is betrayal.” At the end of the march, we all crowded into the dark, woolen warmth of another church, holding candles and singing “Shalom” in a round that made our numbers seem to swell. One candle lit the next until we were a sea of light, the tiny flames we held blurring in my teary eyes into a smeared curtain of fire. In one blink, I saw destruction; in the next, absolute, unflickering hope.