The Grand March

I am not a “march” person. I am not a marcher.

This is what I discovered about myself this weekend. I don’t like marches. Good causes, bad causes, productive, self-indulgent, whatever the reason, whatever the outcome, I don’t much care. I don’t like to march.

It seems like I *ought* to like to march. I like political causes. I like groups of people. I like catchy slogans. I like walking. So presumably, I might like to walk with a group of people while yelling catchy slogans about a political cause. Right?

Yeah, not so much.

I “discovered” this trait of mine this weekend, when I made a valiant (but ultimately failed) attempt to attend Dyke March for Boston Pride Weekend with my friend. She assured me it was lots of fun. Lots of good people, lots of good energy. So I tried. Sort of. Actually, I dreaded it all week, and then bailed to go see a movie with a different friend before the march even began. Oops.

Actually, I’ve always suspected this about myself. As much as I might love the song “Solidarity Forever,” I’m not much into solidarity. Or rallies. Or protests (sacrilege! An Obie that doesn’t like protests!). I’ve walked picket lines because I think they’re both important and effective (far more so than most protests), but I can’t say I totally enjoy it. (Actually, I really enjoyed the time I walked the picket line with my father when I was 12 because he bought me candy & hot chocolate. But that was back in an era when I could be bribed to do just about anything for a box of Nerds.)

There’s this great passage in Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being about The Grand March. (I know; I quote this book endlessly. If you haven’t read it, I insist that you do. Slowly. 10 pages at a time, at most. With lots of time to think. It will absolutely blow your mind.)

But back to The Grand March. Kundera writes a great deal about the meaning of words, and how one phrase or concept can mean entirely different things to two people because of their different life experiences, and how this inability to exchange meaning inhibits communication. (A concept that deserves an entirely separate posting, but that’s for another time.)

In the novel, Franz loved protests and parades. He was a researcher and spent most of his time in the university; thus, he loved being out in the open air with others in his spare time. He “saw the marching shouting crowd as the image of Europe and its history. Europe was the Grand March. The march from revolution to revolution, from struggle to struggle, ever onward.”

Sabina was a refugee from the Czech republic, and she had been forced to attend parades her entire life. She hated parades. In her mind, there was a basic evil behind totalitarianism, and “that image of evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison.”

I don’t know why I reference these passages, except that I couldn’t get the concept of the Grand March out of my mind all week. The concept of marching simply to march. Of the March being the goal, and the cause only secondary. Of my instinctive distaste of shouting slogans in unison with a group of people, regardless of how much I agree with the slogans.