I ran across this article yesterday and was stunned. A woman hung a peace symbol wreath on her home and neighbors demanded that she take it down because it was a) disrespectful to families who have soldiers serving in Iraq and b) a possible sign of Satan. What? I know that I may be a little wacky but I think advocating for peace best serves the soldiers. Peace tends to have fewer fatalities. As for signs of Satan? Well, I realize that most people retired their flowered VW buses awhile ago but I still thought a peace sign was a fairly universal symbol.
Today, it appears that there has been a truce called in the Battle of the Wreath. I think it is time that we reclaim the peace symbol as a sign of patriotism. I'd advocate that we all greet each other by making the peace sign with our fingers but people would probably think we were just flipping them off.
8 comments:
I must really be missing the boat. I read this article yesterday too. What is up with a Christas wreath being considered a sign of the devil...I don't see it?
too much "us vs. them" mentality in this world.
I heard about this on Air America last night and nearly ran off the road. Apparently the head of the condo assn (or whoever) said that nothing "divisive" could be posted. Divisive? So there are people who are anti-peace as a rule?
Eek, don't get me started. Oh wait...you already did!
This reminds me of the nursing mother getting kicked off the plane. The stupidity of our people is definitely an Axis of Evil.
yeah i don't think that it is the wreath part that scares them it is the peace sign....a lot of these types of developments have all kinds of rules as to the colors you can paint your home etc....
anyway i sent this to a freind of mine who has a peace sign that is like a wreat on her home in south Minneapolis - where peace signs are acceptable
peace
leigh
I wonder if you're allowed to put up campaign signs in your yard there. Those are divisive as hell. But there's that pesky First Amendment nonsense...
from today's NY Timews
there is hope!!!!!peace...leigh
Pro-Peace Symbol Forces Win Battle in Colorado Town
By KIRK JOHNSON
Published: November 29, 2006
DENVER, Nov. 28 — Peace is fighting back in Pagosa Springs.
(thre was a photo here)
Randi Pierce/Durango Herald, via Associated Press
Bill Trimarco and Lisa Jensen with their symbolic wreath.
Last week, a couple were threatened with fines of $25 a day by their homeowners’ association unless they removed a four-foot wreath shaped like a peace symbol from the front of their house.
The fines have been dropped, and the three-member board of the association has resigned, according to an e-mail message sent to residents on Monday.
Two board members have disconnected their telephones, apparently to escape the waves of callers asking what the board could have been thinking, residents said. The third board member, with a working phone, did not return a call for comment.
In its original letter to the couple, Lisa Jensen and Bill Trimarco, the association said some neighbors had found the peace symbol politically “divisive.”
A board member later told a newspaper that he thought the familiar circle with angled lines was also, perhaps, a sign of the devil.
The peace symbol came to prominence in the late 1950s as the logo for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, a British antiwar group, according to the group’s Web site. It incorporates the semaphore flag images for the letters in the group’s name, a “D” atop an “N.”
Other people have said the upright line with arms angled down, commonplace in the United States in the Vietnam War, especially, has roots in the early Christian era, representing a twisted or broken cross.
Mr. Trimarco said he put up the wreath as a general symbol of peace on earth, not as a commentary on the Iraq war or another political statement.
In any case, there are now more peace symbols in Pagosa Springs, a town of 1,700 people 200 miles southwest of Denver, than probably ever in its history.
On Tuesday morning, 20 people marched through the center carrying peace signs and then stomped a giant peace sign in the snow perhaps 300 feet across on a soccer field, where it could be easily seen.
“There’s quite a few now in our subdivision in a show of support,” Mr. Trimarco said.
A former president of the Loma Linda community, where Mr. Trimarco lives, said Tuesday that he had stepped in to help form an interim homeowners’ association.
The former president, Farrell C. Trask, described himself in a telephone interview as a military veteran who would fight for anyone’s right to free speech, peace symbols included.
Town Manager Mark Garcia said Pagosa Springs was building its own peace wreath, too. Mr. Garcia said it would be finished by late Tuesday and installed on a bell tower in the center of town.
Thanks Leigh! Cooler heads prevailed. (see? people do comment after you - after all!)
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