Metaphor of the Month

It can be frustrating to try and solve problems you see in the world. I can hardly bring myself to read the news sometimes, because I get so impatient and dismayed watching the same battles fought over and over again. The bleeding edge of activism moves back and forth for years before any progress can be declared.

This process is unequivocally organic. If you've ever gone diving or snorkeling, it's reminiscent of the way coral reefs evolve. Each kind of coral creates a no man's land around itself: the result is a constant, toxic warfare with other kinds of plants, animals and other coral. Eventually, one chemical cocktail wins and the colony expands. The whole landscape is altered over and over this way.

If you look over decades of political history, you see the same pattern in people. As ideas are vetted, chosen and discarded by both sides, the conversation changes. And the same toxic no man's land exists around the most strident voices at the fringe of every debate.

Being a person and not a coral polyp, this seems like valuable real estate. There is no reason to watch ideologies battle from the trenches; it's not like we're dodging real shrapnel. Jump in the conversation with anything you can find. Happily, we already occupied a little piece months ago. Stephanie led the charge, and we deployed an ignorant army. It needed no marching orders at all, and it demonstrated most eloquently...

Let me know if you ever meet a person who would look this nice after standing in front of a high school with a sign for two months! They demanded no breaks and didn't even need to be fed.
I don't think this is quite guerrilla gardening so much as floral diplomacy. They can do more than clash by night on a darkling plain. They can greet the dawn and the dusk with sweet faces and they do not need words to make their statements. Still, I'm glad no one seems to have made off with the signs yet. I'll be adding more pictures to this post when I can get the scanner working, so you can watch our influence continue to grow...