by Cara Watkins

Lately I’ve been on a mission to find the peace sign. It all started back around the holidays. I wanted to send some cards that said something about peace. I live in what’s supposed to be the most liberal place in the country, Northern California’s Bay Area, so I thought this wouldn’t be hard.

It wasn’t just hard, it was nearly impossible. One wizened store employee just laughed and told me no one was interested buying stuff with peace right then. He waved a pack of Christmas cards at me bearing a flag-clad Santa whose sleigh was fueled by eight star-nosed reindeer.

“This is what sells,” he said.

And still is selling many months later.

Not the Santas of course, but anything that screams patriotism.

But I couldn’t stop wondering about peace signs and what it means to people now.

In my search for the sign, I began to learn more about its origin.

According to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament website, the design came from the letters N(uclear) and D(isarmament) in semaphore code, the international signaling alphabet used with flags. N is two flags, arms downstretched at a forty-five degree angle, and D is two flags, one arm straight up and one straight down.
It was created in 1958 by Gerald Holtom, a British conscientious objector, to advocate nuclear disarmament at the first major march protesting nuclear weapons in Aldermaston, England, where the weapons were, and still are, manufactured.

The symbol was quickly adopted in the United States when a friend of Martin Luther King Jr., Bayard Rustin, brought it back from the Aldermaston March and began using it during Civil Rights marches.
Anti-Vietnam War protesters picked it up and its simplicity quickly replaced the peace dove by Pablo Picasso that was often used to represent peace.

Never copyrighted, the symbol is still recognized in Great Britain as the logo for nuclear disarmament, but is known worldwide for peace and non-violence.

The hand-gesture peace sign is thought to have begun in Europe during World War II when a V for victory was painted on walls as a symbol of freedom from occupying forces. The sign was widely used by peace movements in the 1960s and 1970s as a symbol of victory for peace and truth.

My search took me to the city of Berkeley, birthplace of the American peace and anti-war movements.

Here I found peace signs on stickers, posters, T-shirts and lots of other things, but store employees said they had not been selling as well since Sept. 11.

“It’s the real patriotic stuff that’s selling great,” said Skye, a sales associate at the Gypsy Trader, one of dozens of retro shops carrying everything from marijuana paraphernalia to love beads on touristy Telegraph Avenue, the street where hundreds of peace demonstrations took place during the Vietnam War years.

“Stuff with flags, anti-bin Laden stickers, these are going like hot cakes,” she said.

Directly across from the UC Berkeley campus, “Just say no to war” and “Give peace a chance” posters decorate the University Gift and Smoke Shop on Durant Street. Store manager Adel opined that the patriotic merchandise was more popular because of an unabashed shift in culture: the pursuit of tremendous wealth at any cost.

“You’re not going to make any money out of peace,” he said. “In order for us to have peace we’d have to stop making weapons, and nobody wants to see America lose that huge business.”

Yet there is some money being made on the peace sign — through its commercialization and capitalizing on the huge rise in popularity of ’60s and ’70s fashion, including psychedelia, music, art, literature and nostalgia. Though most people don’t display the peace sign alone as a concept in and of itself, I was able to find it as a secondary focal point on all kinds of merchandise. I found it in ads for the Volkswagen Beetle, on posters touting rave parties and adorning T-shirts for Berkeley, Haight-Ashbury, the Grateful Dead and Phish.

It’s no longer an expression of one’s feelings or political beliefs, it carries no emotional impact. Flying the flag from your vehicle tells everyone you are proud to be an American and agree with the course of the current government. An anti-bin Laden sticker shows where you stand when it comes to terrorism. The peace sign, however, indicates that you know what’s in.

As the Gypsy Trader’s Skye pointed out, the peace symbol merchandise usually sells because of the store’s location in a destination “hippie” tourist area.

“You get everyone from teens and the elderly wanting to buy something, anything, with a peace sign on it — candleholders, pipes, T-shirts. They come to Berkeley and think, ‘Hey man, peace!’ and go home happy with their tie-dyed shirt and peace sign.”

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