OK, in the first place, on a national level, I don't think I'm supposed to exist.

I'm what political woofers in the 1960s and 1970s called a "big city ethnic," a term once used to refer to non-Hispanic downtown whites like Italians in Newark, Jews in New York City, Poles in Cleveland and a bunch of other white European immigrants and their descendants who fled apartment and three-decker city life in the wake of what we used to call "integration."

The big city ethnics of those days took their stand around one or two final white mayors of their cities and then fled to the suburbs, where they named their daughters "Heather."

Fall River, Mass., a granite jewel in a jobless setting, houses many like me, guys who still walk to the bakery for a loaf of bread that's hot when we take it from the cashier's hands. We all still live within a half-mile of a Catholic church.

Like family farmers, never-married aunts with no children, small lumberyard and hardware store owners, shoe repairmen and nuns, people like me and the other people on my block seem to be at the heel of things.

I wasn't too sure what to do about this feeling of living amidst things ending, so I bought a Buddha.

A concrete Buddha. About 18 inches high. The kind you (or at least I) put out in the yard.

I am not a Buddhist of any description. I am a baptized Roman Catholic. I like the Buddha, though. I find him peaceful to look at, and I think he will look particularly good under a light dusting of snow. In addition, there are two yard statues of the Virgin Mary on my block (it's a big city ethnic thing). I figured we could use the diversity

I bought him near to home because I am old-fashioned enough to buy nearly everything near to home, at Swansea Statuary, a suburban purveyor of cement garden gnomes, saints, and similar objects of devotion and whimsy.

And, of course, I am not supposed to be writing about a Buddha in the yard of my three-decker.

I am supposed to be writing about politics, specifically about upcoming city elections in which it's better than even odds that, if you don't get the incumbents back, you will at least get people who are markedly similar to the incumbents.

In a way, that's the relationship between the politics of tired old mill cities like Fall River and the nation.

Admit it, isn't Barack Obama, once seen as so different, starting to sound much the same as those who came before him?

Those of us who feel endangered, as do big city ethnics as well as almost all working people, are forced to look at politics from one side, if only because there's so little to see if you look politics in the face.

Near the anniversary of Woodstock, just after the death of Ted Kennedy (whose family began as Irish big city ethnics), it's tempting to write about the 1960s, a time that came and went and left tired mill cities like Fall River with a drug problem and little of the promised liberation from economic and political exploitation. "Everybody must get stoned" stuck in Fall River, as it did in a lot of poorer places. "Power to the people" did not.

We writhe in controversy now, as we did then. In fact, the thing that struck me most about recent health care "town meetings" is that mainstream media reports the in-your-face howling of citizens at those meetings in the same horrified tone '60s commentators reserved for the in-your-face howling of hippies at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Commentators demanded civility then, just as they do now. "Agree to disagree" is still code for "shut up."

And the Buddha?

Well, you don't decorate the yard of a house you don't own, and you don't ornament a place where you don't plan to stay.

Me and Buddha, we're in for the duration.

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