--- In [email protected], "authfriend" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
>
> Follow-up on the Great Peace Sign Flap from today's NYTimes:
>
> November 29, 2006
> Pro-Peace Symbol Forces Win Battle in Colorado Town
> By KIRK JOHNSON
>
> DENVER, Nov. 28 Peace is fighting back in Pagosa Springs.
>
> Last week, a couple were threatened with fines of $25 a day by
their
> homeowners' association unless they removed a four-foot wreath
shaped
> like a peace symbol from the front of their house.
>
> The fines have been dropped, and the three-member board of the
> association has resigned, according to an e-mail message sent to
> residents on Monday.
>
> Two board members have disconnected their telephones, apparently
to
> escape the waves of callers asking what the board could have been
> thinking, residents said. The third board member, with a working
> phone, did not return a call for comment.
>
> In its original letter to the couple, Lisa Jensen and Bill
Trimarco,
> the association said some neighbors had found the peace symbol
> politically "divisive."
>
> A board member later told a newspaper that he thought the familiar
> circle with angled lines was also, perhaps, a sign of the devil.
>
> The peace symbol came to prominence in the late 1950s as the logo
for
> the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, a British antiwar group,
> according to the group's Web site. It incorporates the semaphore
flag
> images for the letters in the group's name, a "D" atop an "N."
>
> Other people have said the upright line with arms angled down,
> commonplace in the United States in the Vietnam War, especially,
has
> roots in the early Christian era, representing a twisted or broken
> cross.
>
> Mr. Trimarco said he put up the wreath as a general symbol of
peace
> on earth, not as a commentary on the Iraq war or another political
> statement.
>
> In any case, there are now more peace symbols in Pagosa Springs, a
> town of 1,700 people 200 miles southwest of Denver, than probably
> ever in its history.
>
> On Tuesday morning, 20 people marched through the center carrying
> peace signs and then stomped a giant peace sign in the snow
perhaps
> 300 feet across on a soccer field, where it could be easily seen.
>
> "There's quite a few now in our subdivision in a show of support,"
> Mr. Trimarco said.
>
> A former president of the Loma Linda community, where Mr. Trimarco
> lives, said Tuesday that he had stepped in to help form an interim
> homeowners' association.
>
> The former president, Farrell C. Trask, described himself in a
> telephone interview as a military veteran who would fight for
> anyone's right to free speech, peace symbols included.
>
> Town Manager Mark Garcia said Pagosa Springs was building its own
> peace wreath, too. Mr. Garcia said it would be finished by late
> Tuesday and installed on a bell tower in the center of town.
>
>
> Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
>
> http://tinyurl.com/yfh8la
>
Thanks- I heard this last night also. Really good news!
