I was downtown in front of the Federal Building with a small crowd assembled to protest war in the Persian Gulf; he was in a black Ford pickup. As the truck roared by he leaned most of his upper body out the window to give me a better view of his finger, and he screamed, “Hey, bitch, love it or leave it!” So I left. He wasn’t the first to give me that instruction; I’ve heard it since I was a nineteen-year-old in a scary barbershop haircut. Now I was thirty-four, mother of a child, with a decent reputation and pretty good hair. Why start listening now? I can only say he was finally one too many. I was on the verge of having a special kind of nervous breakdown, in which a person stalks through a Kmart parking lot ripping yellow ribbons off car antennas. I realize that would have been abridging other people’s right to free expression. What was driving me crazy was that very term “right to free expression,” and how it was being applied in a nation at war. We were supposed to behave as though we had refrigerators for brains.
