one of the reasons it takes me at least half an hour to eat a cup of yogurt

It's some kind of weekend celebration of freedom in this town. I discovered this because as I was sitting on my front porch eating yogurt there was an inordinate amount of traffic in front of my house, I kept hearing a fire truck make noises but not sirens wailing like in cases of emergency, and then I heard a band begin to play. I walked around the corner and watched the strangest parade. It was a rag tag collection of parents and children–walking, in strollers, on scooters and bikes with training wheels. No floats and only a couple of clear advertizing/campaign pushes. Mostly just parents and children. I began to wonder if the prerequisite for understanding freedom was being a child or having children.

It's both great and disturbing that this parade happened like this. Great because what a true movement of the proletariat: people banding together because they are part of a community. Disturbing because it seems a limited view of our town. There are many reasons for this, with two big ones. The young family stage is a natural point to begin settling down and becoming involved in your community. The other biggie is because I live in an area that is excited about families and freedom to a fault. Pardon if this insults, I don't mean to. I strongly believe in families and appreciate living in a country where every man and woman is "endowed by their creator to certain rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" is at least a respected argument, if it is not always acted upon and supported. The fault is that we don't examine all complexities of family and freedom.

I'm also pointing out that we continue in the rut of banding together in homogenous groups so that the superficial part of abstract ideas are represented rather than humanity.

In other words: the young families stick together, the senior citizens stick, the flirty singles stick, the singles who resent the other group's preening behavior stick, there's the various fractions of people who don't identify with the overarching Mormon vibe of this place. All these groups perpetually in place becoming caricatures instead of individual, whole people.

And sure, I'm guilty too.

It's something I constantly need to remind myself of in order to move past superficial differences that give me an excuse to alienate myself.


All that being said, toddler girls in pioneer dresses and floppy bonnets are pretty adorable and it's always interesting to see how a child will react when their balloon has escaped to fly away in the sky.