On a day when they were in the process of electing a new pope, on a day when it was raining, on a day when the Texas Legislature was considering legalizing switchblade knives, I skipped down a rain-soaked sidewalk singing songs from "West Side Story," the only tunes I know that are suitable to thinking about switchblade knives.

What do you need a switchblade for these days? Maybe you need one so you can keep killing when the last shot in your 30-round magazine is gone and there's still some grade-school kids around.

Or maybe you need it to be part of a well ordered militia, so you can fight off the socialists when they come for your knives.

I was going for coffee, one of several things that come into my midsized city after being grown by peasants south of the border, down Colombia way.

I bet the Chinese are gearing up the switchblade factories, ready to flood the Texas Wal-Marts with zip/click/shiny/greasy fast switchblades. Goddamn Americans will buy anything if you can eat it with ketchup, get the Internet on it or use it to spill somebody's nearly digested Big Mac on the sidewalk.

The Texas effort, I'm informed, is being supported by people the news stories call "knife rights advocates," a group I didn't know existed. Presumably, you will take their knives away from them when you pry them from their cold, dead fingers.

Being a reporter with nearly 30 years experience, I can tell you that the reporter who wrote that story had to call, email or otherwise contact some group of knife rights advocates and will now be deluged, at least weekly, with electronic "press releases" recounting the political triumphs of that group, as well as its tragedies, its annual knife show and the knife's connection to the Founding Fathers.

Say you're Thomas Jefferson and you're slipping down to the slave quarters in search of an hour's fun with a girl who will be compliant if only because you own her. Even if she is your property, she may have a father, a mother or even a lover of her own color. He/she/them may object to you plucking their little blossom, so a knife in your breeches pocket evens things up. After all, if you leave the house with your flintlock rifle and it's not hunting season, the wife might get suspicious.

Admittedly, most of the Founding Fathers used their switchblades only to build this great nation, stabbing redcoats or digging the Erie Canal, but a knife, like an automatic weapon, can sometimes be put to a bad use. Believe me, I've seen it happen.

Maybe three years ago, on a Sunday, I was walking this same sidewalk, on my way to the funeral of a hometown boy who died, I believe, in Iraq. In front of the coffee shop, a boy in the uniform of the local high school's Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps handed me a small American flag, which I held reverently on my lap while I took notes at the other boy's funeral. The flag is on my desk still, though I don't tell people who gave it to me or when.

And in the coffee shop, this week, a relatively neat but slightly street-worn fellow stood behind me in line and, from time to time, would turn, take a step back and open the door for someone coming into the coffee shop.

"I read about it," he said to me. "I read a book about the Dalai Lama, and he said if you do nice things for people it comes back to you.

"I like to read," the guy said, a lock of his wet brown hair falling onto his pale forehead. "I used to think you had to go to college to get an education, but you can just read."

You can indeed and, in a coffee shop or on a sidewalk wet with early spring rain, you can hold a flag or a cup of coffee, a cigarette or a switchblade, a book or a thought.

But only the switchblade will keep you free.

And even if it won't keep you free, it's shiny and it makes a threatening "click" when you flick it open in the face of tyranny.

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion or read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com.