When I went to the border, they said I was there to fight. Fight for what I believed in. Fight back. Fight for peace.
In the dust kicked up by the boots of three thousand soldiers, fighting for peace became a farce. Like the hippie placing a flower in the muzzle of a soldier’s gun. That famous photograph.
I realized, as I linked arms with a woman in flared rainbow sleeves, her head shaved and a peace sign painted on the scalp over a short buzz of hair, that it was all totally farcical. To stand up to guns with flowers.
I fought with my sisters when I was little. Once, my older sister became enraged and pummeled her fists into my ribs and belly, and after she left I just lay there. I laughed at her. Her punches didn’t hurt. Still, I lay there like a victim.
I felt wronged, and I felt as if I had lost, so I just lay there in submission. I’m not sure I had lost, though. By laughing at the pain I showed a bully that her physical superiority didn’t mean anything to me. She was the oppressor. The bad guy. By losing the fight, I had won the right to wear the good guy’s white hat.
No one could tell me whether anyone in Donna Texas had ever seen a hippie before. We arrived with rainbow bands wrapped around our foreheads, pinning our hair down, and tied in a knot at the back of our scalps. Face painted tie-dye onto our cheeks.
The troops at Donna were deployed from Kentucky. It didn’t seem like they were expecting to find hippies at the border. We held flowers. White Monja Blancas, the national flower of Guatemala, for peace, and black dahlias, which signify dignity.
The dahlia is the national flower of Mexico.
We were there to take photos, to hold out our black and white bouquets to the soldiers. To let the photographers capture what we look like.
That’s why we wore long floral skirts. That’s why we painted rainbows and peace signs on our cheeks. We didn’t interfere. We didn’t speak. We didn’t chant.
We just arrived.
Thousands of us arrived, and allowed ourselves to be photographed. Americans in more different colors than there are in the spectrum of the rainbow. Americans with more colors in our hearts than you can name, define, identify.
We didn’t fight back. We didn’t stop it. We let them know that we were watching. In every photograph, we wore small placid Buddha smiles. We held blankets. Not rainbow blankets — muted colors, tan, gray, navy. We stood next to crates of water bottles. Just stood. We didn’t fight. We didn’t speak. We didn’t condemn. Thousands of us, we came with an offer.
That was it. An offer. An option. A choice. In the pictures we don’t look like warriors, or fighters.
We look like an offering.
