My Walden type friend from St. Louis told me today that the large mystery plant that reigns in my rain garden was just a ‘weed’. This designation verifies my wife’s view of the plant and suggestion to remove it from the rain garden. Actually, whether it is categorized as a weed, flower, bush or tree does not matter or detract from its beauty in my eyes. Like a child who looks at a dandelion the same way as a flower, so do I look at this plant, no matter what it is.

This experience reminds me of my distaste for stigmas, categorization, labels put on human beings. Often we judge people not by their present actions but by the labels we apply to them or the categories we put them in. Although there is usually some partial truth to the category, label or stigma, it does not really represent who the person is or what he or she may do.

An example of labeling came today in my life when my friend and I went to visit a mutual friend in Milwaukee. He referred to me as a “protester” and someone who likes to “protest”. In reality, for years after I got out of prison in 1970 for the Milwaukee 14 action, I could support but not participate in “protests”. Although I have softened my stance in recent years I still do not consider speaking truth to power in word or nonviolent action and by Breaking The Silence to be protests. I like to think of myself in some very small way following in footsteps of persons like Lorenzo Rosebaugh, Gandhi, or Dorothy Day, all of whom I would not consider “protesters”. I do not pretend to be great persons like these three or others, but like the great persons I quoted in last night’s post or like Martin Luther King I cannot be silent in the face of injustice or oppression, or as King says on “an issue that is destroying the soul of our nation…”

Perhaps I protest about protesting too much. Like the mystery plant in the rain garden, does it matter if it is called, weed, flower, bush or tree — does it really matter if what I do is called protest or not?

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