The Very Brave Woman in the Jug Handle

We often think of men with rifles running into the face of the enemy as our exemplar of what it means to be "brave." But how many of those tough guys would be as courageous as the woman in the following story?

In Lexington, the Birthplace of the American Revolution, at the intersection of Route 4/225 and Hartwell Ave, there is a jug handle. I don't know if this is called the same thing everywhere in the country; I didn't learn the term till I moved to Boston. It's what locals call the traffic construction where there's not enough room in the middle of the road for a special, left-turn-only lane, so the right lane suddenly splits out to the right, curves out, then back in to cross the original road exactly perpendicularly. Sorry if you knew that already.

The jug handle at 4/225 led to a bunch of office parks, decrepit white collar hell holes, an MIT defense-related lab, and finally, the Hanscom Air Force Base. Every day on the way to work I would have to sit at that jug handle for 2 to 8 minutes.

The curve of the jug handle surrounds a chunk of useless land, a little patch of foul, smoked grass. That's where the very brave woman stood. It was 2003, and 9/11 was still quite fresh in peoples' mind. She appeared one day in the jug handle. She looked to be about 28 years of age, blonde, quite lovely, and perhaps Eastern European, Polish maybe.

She would stand at the side of the road on most days and held up signs that were really quite simple in conception, but devastating in effect: All she did was put up the headlines that she found that day concerning the Israel/Palestine conflict, e.g.

IDF Bulldozers Demolish Gaza House, Two Children Killed

Maybe she also included some web sites to visit to read more, and maybe she had some handouts. That was all.

And oh how the people would hate her! Ordinary, boring-looking white collar dudes on their way to their white collar, boring jobs would shout such foul invectives at her, as if, by her mere presence at the side of the road, she was worthy of receiving all the hatreds and frustrations these poor pathetic white men had stored up.

And the beauty of it was, this lovely young blonde woman, would, in response to the foul invective, just raise her eyebrows and shake her head and say (via her eyes), 'Oh, my poor friend, don't you see? Of course, you see. That's why you're sad.'

I remember being at work, and the conversation once turned to that blonde woman, and one of the company founders referred to her as that 'crazy lady,' and everyone laughed. I said, 'I think she's brave,' and everyone laughed again, a little suspicious of me, and I didn't press it.

So that's how the average, modern, educated American reacts to a citizen exercising their right to free speech: That Crazy Lady!

Now that is bravery, to stand there and exercise your right of free speech, and to accept the slings and arrows of all the so-called normal people.

Someday I hope to stand in that woman's steps in that jug handle on the side of 4/225.