When I left Austin, it was early. When I drove through Mcgregor, the electric sign said 106 degrees. When I got out of the truck in Crawford, it felt like I was walking into a blast furnace. I had a bad feeling.
There is a little white house next to Peace House. It looks very similar. It's small and I'm guessing it was built about the same time. Today it was the staging area for a little demonstration by some Bush supporters - a stirring iteration of the values we all share. We have a great deal in common - they want peace too.
"Crawford wants Peace", said the sign at the little white house, "Go to Iraq".
This corner was an excellent place for a teaching moment. So there were the lawn chairs, the bottles of water (if you ever come to Crawford bring a lawn chair, and a case of water, even if you don't plan to stop), the protesters and the signs. And they had some edifying things to say. Barbara's sign said, "Freedom to protest is not free" (I'm right there with you Barbara, my Exxon bill is $300 higher this month). She was not unsympathetic to Cindy. She is a mother too. "I'm sorry he's dead", she said, "But he would have died no matter where he was at, because God took him out". I asked for her last name, "we don't give last names", she said.
It was the pièce de résistance of our disagreement in our sad bifurcated country. The modest house with the scrubby lawn, the pretty trees and the wishing well, was a petri dish of protest. The signs themselves seem to be a cryptic series of nonsequitors. I didn't know what they were telling me. Was there some unifying principle?
None of the Bush supportors seem to have anything else to say to me. So I decided to cross the street to Peace House - a.k.a "The House that Osama and Saddam Built". As I was crossing the street, a little boy about four years old, in navy shorts and a yellow shirt, ran up to me waving exictedly. His brown hair clung to his forehead in damp tendrils and I was undone, as I always am, by the ravishing beauty of children.
"Goodbye idiot", he said.
I wish I was making this up.
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