Protesters raise their homemade banners and their homemade voices, calling for something uncertain. It’s not that they don’t know everything that’s needed, but it’s impossible to pin things down to just one slogan or chant, when the ideologies we all walk on are like the quicksand that seemed an omnipresent threat in comics and cowboy films when all the world was young and simple. Beyond absolute necessity, I don’t know why I’m here, and instead of words, I decorate my cardboard placard with symbols I remember from an early 70s album cover, set against a landscape copied from Pieter Bruegel the Elder, because I still believe that art may save us all in some unfathomable way: and when I open my mouth, a bright blue butterfly flies out and merges with a million or more others in a scintillating cacophony of wings. Something changes, but there’s still so much to do.
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Oz Hardwick
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