{"id":790,"date":"2006-11-29T17:19:00","date_gmt":"2006-11-29T17:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/chatteringmind\/2006\/11\/peace-love-and-controversy-29.html"},"modified":"2006-11-29T17:19:00","modified_gmt":"2006-11-29T17:19:00","slug":"peace-love-and-controversy-29","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/chatteringmind\/2006\/11\/peace-love-and-controversy-29.html","title":{"rendered":"Peace, Love, and Controversy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>It always amazes me when the word\u2014or symbol for\u2014”peace” upsets people. <\/p>\n

A couple in Pagosa Springs, Colo. was recently told by a community association to remove a peace sign-shaped wreath from outside their house, reports The New York Times<\/a>, lest they be fined $25 a day. They told the couple the symbol was politically divisive and one member later said it looked like “a sign of the devil.” <\/p>\n

When outrage broke out, the three members of the homeowner’s association resigned and neighbors held a march, hung their own symbols, and created a 300-foot peace sign on a local soccer field. <\/p>\n

One of the sign’s owners said all he meant to promote was world peace.<\/p>\n

This all brings back vivid memories from my Quaker boarding school days during the first Iraq war. A bunch of students wove blue garbage bags into a chainlink fence on our property that faced a highway to read “peace.” Oh, the calls, the harassments, the threats. The school was inundated with demands for its removal. It was my first experience of wide-eyed shock at how something that seemed so instrinsic to me, so “duh” as to be clich\u00e9, could be so controversial. <\/p>\n

We debated long and hard at our community meeting\u2014I lost all respect for the librarian who suggested we take it down to avoid conflict\u2014but ultimately, peace won. <\/p>\n

And it looks like it’s winning in Colorado. It still boggles my mind though, that it was ever a question in the first place. You know?<\/p>\n

What are your peace-sign associations? Do you wear them, hang them, think they’re bad?<\/p>\n

By Valerie Reiss. Amy’s on vacation.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It always amazes me when the word\u2014or symbol for\u2014”peace” upsets people. A couple in Pagosa Springs, Colo. was recently told by a community association to remove a peace sign-shaped wreath from outside their house, reports The New York Times, lest they be fined $25 a day. They told the couple the symbol was politically divisive…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nPeace, Love, and Controversy - Chattering Mind<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/chatteringmind\/2006\/11\/peace-love-and-controversy-29.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Peace, Love, and Controversy - Chattering Mind\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"It always amazes me when the word\u2014or symbol for\u2014”peace” upsets people. 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She was a founding editor at Breathe magazine, and her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, Women's Health, Natural Health, Yoga Journal, Lime.com, Vegetarian Times, and ABCNEWS.com. A native New Yorker, Valerie holds an M.S. from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and a B.A. from Beloit College in Creative Writing with a minor in Women's Studies. She also lived in Maui for a while where she drank green papaya juice and taught some creative writing. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/chatteringmind\/author\/vreiss"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/chatteringmind\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/chatteringmind\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/chatteringmind\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/chatteringmind\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/38"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/chatteringmind\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=790"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/chatteringmind\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/790\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/chatteringmind\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/chatteringmind\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/chatteringmind\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}