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# Walking as Political Expression
- URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/walking-as-political-expression/
- Published: 2010-03-18T02:05:29.000Z
- Updated: 2026-04-20T21:09:47.000Z
- Description: Walking as Political Expression
- Author: Mere Orthodoxy
- Tags: Matthew Lee Anderson, Uncategorized

The Brits, its been said, are 50 years ahead of us. In this case, I think a more accurate number is 19 years.

To understand the millennial emphasis on individuality, there is no better film to watch than [Dead Poet's Society](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/6305144168?ie=UTF8&tag=mereorth-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=6305144168&ref=mereorthodoxy.com). The film, which is incredibly destructive, made *carpe diem* the motto of our particularly angsty-generation.

No scene better encapsulates the pernicious emphasis on individuality for its own sake than the one below:

Find your own walk...or exercise your right not to walk. Doesn't matter much. What matters is *not conforming.* And how you walk takes on a broader meaning than arriving between two places. Notice how the military, with its exacting requirements for conformity, is implicated?

But non-conformity has its own price to pay, as the Brits well understood:

Here walking finds its meaning within the bureaucratic state. As the states reach increases, what is ultimately an individual expression becomes the domain of science, codification, and international affairs.

I suspect--though can not prove--that the individualistic emphasis on the former leads to the bureaucratic force of the former.

But in both cases, walking is a type political expression. It is not simply a mode of transportation, but a mode of being in the world that signifies who, and how, we are.

*Postscript: Okay, so I offer this in a spirit of mild jesting. I don't know how seriously to take this, honestly. But I thought of the two clips, realized they belonged together, and couldn't resist....which makes me wonder:*

***How would you analyze the meaning of walking in both clips?***