One of my great personal pleasures is to visit Princeton, New Jersey on a day of beautiful Autumnal weather such as today. Spring temperatures linger like fond memories and sidewalks and stores bustle with students. The coffee shop I patronize is thronged with chattering student life. Tables empty and fill as the tide of classes ebbs and flows. The more studious of my fellow patrons sit hunched over their Mac books diligently at work, fast fingers scrolling and fluttering over keyboards as the young wend their way through the arcana of knowledge and academic requirements. The only men my age appear to be professors nonchalantly surveying the scattered young crowd with the calm assurance of the comfortably tenured and recently published. Like many of the boisterous crowd I’m wearing a tee shirt. Unlike them my plunging neckline would be more at home revealing well developed pecs or eye catching tattoo instead of my elderly sagging chest with its scatter of hair. No one comments or stares because it is my trousers that has them curious or possibly even concerned. Two years ago I bought a pair of fleece lined cargo pants. They were intended to be worn when I worked on the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in lieu of my standing and freezing helplessly in the cold wind while I operated my camera for NBC. Pants most suited for carrying small easily lost or forgotten items, cigarettes, cell phones and the like. Unfortunately they are equally as suited for carrying ammo clips, smaller pistols and larger knives. They are the kind of trousers usually associated with insurrectionists and preppers. Pants probably last seen by these students in news footage of Right Wing paramilitary groups and MAGA types as they attacked the United State’s Capitol building in January. When I move, eyes follow. If I stand quickly, young faces do everything but flinch. Unfortunately these are the lessons learned by most contemporary Americans as our country fails Democracy and passes helplessly into turmoil. Thankfully I brought along another pair of pants, black, frayed and faded. I will fit right in.