Ethnic Diversity March in Bozeman: MLK Day and Neo-Nazi's.

Minna celebrated her 20 month birthday by attending her first protest rally yesterday. We all walked down Main Street in Bozeman for the Martin Luther King "Diversity Day" event. We marched for 8 blocks alongside the "Livingston Womens Group" and behind the "Gallatin Valley Interfaith Organization" banner. Children and parents carried hand-drawn posters declaring "Bozeman Supports Diversity" and "No Matter What the Color of Our Skin We Are The Same Inside." All this would have been very cute and innocent, perhaps ironic too, given that Bozeman's ethnic population amounts to only a few dozen African American, Hispanic and Asians plus maybe 50 Jews. Except that this event will be viewed in the future as an important milestone for Bozeman. Word of it's coming together had fascinated this growth-stressed community for weeks. Officially, the march and rally, organized by the hastily established "Gallatin Valley Human Rights Task" was an MLK Day commemoration. But it's more urgent purpose was to show community outrage at the recent local emergence of a white supremacist hate group, the National Alliance, that has been targeting Bozeman and Livingston for new recruits and testing the community for a possible headquarters. Over a thousand people showed up on this cold snowy Sunday, singing and banging drums and excitedly greeting one another as neighbors tend to do under such circumstances. Until we came upon 11 men and 2 women standing on the steps of the Gallatin County Court... like grotesque wax museum figures from a ghastly era... each with a sickly grin on their face, holding slogans, banners and swastikas. The procession of marchers bottlenecked in front of them, all of us silently staring with a horrified fascination. A swoon of shock and nausea came up and I had to choke back tears... much like the feeling I had when, from the dust coated window of my father's evacuated, apartment, I first saw the twisted, still smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center just across the street. It's really something to be part of a growing community like Bozeman, where everything is still in flux and it's future is wide open. In only the 6 months that we've lived in the area full time, I've developed a strong sense of local responsibility, a sense of my uniqueness and a keen awareness that I am needed here. Michelle, Minna and I really did make a difference by participating yesterday. Very unlike my liberal big-city mindset where I had a sense of complacency, no... apathy, knowing that attending events like "Diversity Day" would be embarrassingly PC, trite and redundant. It just didn't every seem necessary to show up...it being so obvious, that everyone here takes ethnic diversity as a given... no big deal... and besides, all the usual "psuedo professional and hobby protestor" suspects will be there, and then again on tonight's local news. But here in Montana, I no longer take any of that for granted.