Democrats and Vegans

The weather is turning colder and my morning walk to the Metro is quite brisk. I like this time of year very much, actually, and I had spent so many autumns in Utah or elsewhere that I forgot how nice the trees look in the fall. After a stifling summer, the cooler weather has really been a welcome break. On the campaign front, however, things are still heating up, and you can’t walk a block in this city without being reminded of it.

For some reason people seem to think that if they stage demonstrations they will change the outcome of the elections. So they plaster posters on street signs and protest in the streets. The group I am most amused/annoyed by has recently taken residence at the entrance to the Foggy Bottom Metro station. I assume by their ages that they are students from George Washington University, and they do very odd things. They try to hand out homemade flyers about the evils of the current administration, which isn’t that odd. But the other day they had a choir singing slow hymns or something. For some reason that didn’t make me want to run home and register myself with the Democratic Party. But it did make me want to stare and wonder what they were thinking, which was probably what they wanted so they could give me more homemade flyers. This group also has a particularly creative set of posters and banners (which happen to always be in the way when I try to walk by). Most of the posters involve funny caricatures or altered photographs of the current president and various slogans, most of which are extremely creative but unprintable.
Actually, that part of town seems to be a veritable hotbed of activism of all sorts. One night the Redhead and I were approached by a guy handing out a “vegetarian guide to restaurants in DC”. Now, I am not a huge vegetarian eater—I tried tofu once and thought it was rather tasteless—but I’m always looking for presents. So we took it, thinking it might be useful. It turned out to be 95% PETA propaganda that had small bios on animals like “Ashley” the pig and “Julie” the chicken. Although I respect people’s decisions to eat or act a certain way, I couldn’t help finding humor in the article that claimed even goldfish have thoughts and feelings. That little magazine actually provided us with an entire evening of entertainment, especially after we found a similar Web site entitled “PETA: People Eating Tasty Animals.”