I complained a few days ago that politics is rather tame these days, the few people prepared to stand up for what they believe in. Nailing your colours to the mast if you will.
Here is a fragment of an article by Donald Soper that appeared in Tribune, a left wing British newspaper in the 1950s. It happens to be about one of the anti-nuclear marches to Aldermaston, the British atomic weapons research establishment, but it speaks loudly to anyone, left or right, involved in campaigning for their cause, whatever it may be.
As I think of the Aldermaston march, I am reminded of the paradox that there is nothing so contemporary as the past.
One of the first bits of human writing scratched on a stone dug out of the sands of the Middle East reads: 'What a world we live in, children no longer obey their parents and everybody wants to write a book'; and that sounds up to date enough for anybody, though it is probably twenty thousand years old. [it is normally a quote attributed to Cicero, a Roman statesman and philosopher 106-35 BC - bushytailedfox]
Whatever our early forefathers did about the situation thus described, it is reasonably certain that some of them got together in the open air, marched somewhere, and ended up with a demonstration at a shrine or other appropriate and significant spot.
This kind of public witness is as old as the hills and is still potentially the most effective means of expressing and stimulating public opinion.
It provides a real though partial answer - if only by adding legs to ideas - to those who feel the irresistible urge to do something more than to register a conviction.
It breaks through the 'public meeting' barrier and communicates its message to those who seem totally impervious to the appeal to assemble together indoors...
It 'confirms the feeble knees' of those who are weak in the faith by giving them the exhilaration of a public witness to the convictions.
The marcher is a marked man. He has nailed his colours to a mast that is plainly visible. To put it exactly in Miltonic words, the virtue of those who go in processions is no longer 'unexercised and unbreathed'.
- Donald Soaper, 1958