They Walk Among Us—Cheers!
This past week as I walked around the block, I noticed two people sporting some weird outfits while they strolled across the street from me. On top of his extensively bulging dreads, a young man had fastened a ropey, bloated backpack that added about a foot to his head. His precariously perched headgear unceremoniously wiggle-waggled, but the guy kept a steady pace. His clothing was nondescript. Nothing else about him was remarkable, except that his sandals were abnormally bulky as if he were trying to have them match the load on his head.
An early middle-aged woman was costumed at least as a two-thirds American patriot. Her hair was equidistantly colored deep blue on one side and blazing red on the other. Her top had wide swaths of pale blue and fire red horizontal stripes abutting one another. Both of her pant legs were adorned with concentric vivid red and blue circles. Her socks were speckled with red dots, and her running shoes were basically soft blue with splashy red trim. She walked as if she were oblivious to her histrionic dress.
I don’t think that the young man was trying to make any kind of statement, fashion or ideological. But I’d like to think that the older woman was expressing a political metaphor. For the most part, the arrays of blue and red colors were equally represented from her hair to her shoes. Perhaps she was trying to reconcile the fanatical partisan divide in this country (conservative red states vs. liberal blue states). If so, I’d consider her a true patriot.
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