Oh, peace symbol, we hardly knew ye.

Two days ago, I was vividly reminded of why I never go to the mall.

(Borders is not part of the mall. When I go in the general vicinity of the mall, I ONLY go to Borders. I park outside Borders and do not set foot in the rest of the mall. A bookstore cannot be considered to be part of whatever buildings are attached to it. That's like being the bookstore inside a church: just because there's a sanctuary nearby doesn't make it holy. Likewise, just because Borders is attached to the mall doesn't mean it's as superfluous and contaminated as the rest of the mall.)

During the week that is infamously known as Spring Break, the mall is apparently infested with small herds of size zero bulimic tweens dressed like Vegas streetwalkers on a Saturday night, all too young to jet to Cancun, but still attempting to break into the harshly competitive world of "Girls Gone Wild." A cousin of mine coined a term for such creatures: prostitots. Say it aloud and it makes some sense. It's cruel, but apt. Poor girls. I wanted to simultaneously encourage them to feel secure in themselves, cover them with one of those cheap bathrobes from Sears, and chastise them for being such foolhardy youngsters. It was a conflicting set of emotions. I settled for a mild glare and a "back in my day, when it snowed all the time and I walked uphill both ways to school" head shake.

Also, apparently sometime in the last six years that I haven't been inside the mall, Hot Topic made some sort of corporate Faustian deal. They are no longer nonconformist, dark and handsome, as they once were: they are...like some sort of gay emo, torn between wearing black eyeliner and writing depressing poetry and covering themselves in rainbows and pleasant odors. I wandered on by, disappointed that I cannot love Jack Skellington because Hot Topic does.

One of the girls I was with was searching for a simple brown skirt, so I followed along behind her and our other two girlfriends as they all went into Epic Shopping Mode. I'm fairly certain that's a real mode, and that I was born without it. Shopping confounds and frustrates me. I wear jeans until they are as worn as their name brand, deliberately ripped counterparts in Aeropostale and American Eagle. Then I wear them another three months, then I go to Kohl's clearance racks and buy another pair for $9. That is the extent of my shopping. Shopping is like personalized, drawn out torture for me.

Anyway.

We browsed through every clothing store in that mall. By "we," I mean "they," as in, "I stared off into space as they clattered about among the hangers."

As we went along, I spotted a trend. (Ha, I made a pun. Or...wait. No, I didn't. Nevermind.) In every store, on almost every article of clothing, there was a peace symbol. On hoodies, on dresses, on jeans, on T-shirts and scarves - on underwear, for God's sake. Now, I'm a proponent of peace. I wear the peace symbol on a ring almost every day,as a reminder of a book I read once. I'm not a fan of war or the hypocritical monsters it makes of participating countries - and people.

Symbols have power. That is something we seem to have forgotten as a culture: how symbols, made meaningful by agreement, represent whole ideologies, whole movements, events and people, entire stories.

Take the cross. It represents the all stories of the New Testament - a sign of an entire religion, the wars and the movements therein, and when combined with each individual's worldview, a life history.It is a symbol that can inspire hate or love instantly, that people will rally behind or against, that people dedicate their lives to building up or destroying.

Symbols have power.

The peace symbol is not a fashion statement. When wearing any symbol, one should be ready to be accepted as a proponent of the ideas that symbol represents. Or, in my book, they should. But then, I'm an old-fashioned idealist.

In 1951, America rested some submarines burdened with nuclear weapons at a British harbor. A group of college students protested the situation by picketing at the docks, claiming their mantra of "Nuclear Disarmament." Using British Navy semaphore letters - the messages sent between British ships in earlier times by men on deck who mimed coded letters - "N" and "D" were the acronym they chose. "N" in semaphore letters is represented with one arm raised straight towards the sky and one pressed down against the body, forming a line perpendicular to the earth. "D" is formed with both arms pointed downward on either side of the body at forty-five degree angles. Superimpose one upon the other and paint a circle around them, and you've got the peace symbol.

Ten years later, the symbol was adopted by American college students, and was hugely controversial. It was spray-painted across walls as the Vietnam war progressed, and many students who toted the sign on clothes or notebooks were expelled, had scholarships revoked, were placed on academic probation, ostracized, hazed, or even beaten.

It was not a benign symbol. As it moved into the realm of protests it became a sign associated with violence, danger and the skewed visions of youth. At riots, students wearing the peace sign were the main targets of the fire hoses, gas bombs and billy clubs.

The generation that was middle-aged in the sixties feared the changes that their children were so desperate for. They began to speak of the peace symbol as "the broken cross," a vicious anti-Christian misnomer that has been culturally retained even to my childhood years. I heard it called that inside the walls of the church where I grew up.

It was a step of social rebellion to wear the peace symbol in the 1960s, and no one did so without knowing the sign's significance. It was a somber decision and a reflection of strongly held personal values. The peace sign was not a fashion statement then, and it isn't now.

But it is a statement. It speaks through three simple lines and a circle of a rich history, of a different time and different people who inhabited a not so very different world - and it is still dangerous.

It worries me that a symbol that once held such intense power has become so impotent. When symbols lose their power, it means that people have become less aware, and less active. It means not only that they know less, but that they are willing to know less.

I stood in a store - Deb, Wet Seal, something like that; they're all the same - and gazed at a rack of clothes. Six shirts in a row sported different versions of the peace sign. And I'm not kidding you: I almost cried.