War & Peace Quote by David Selby

Nostalgia can be cheap; Selby’s isn’t. He doesn’t pine for “the Sixties” as an aesthetic mood board. He names an object so modest it’s almost embarrassing - peace beads - and that’s the point. In an era we remember through grainy spectacle, he spotlights the handmade, the portable, the social technology of sincerity. Beads are small enough to be given away, worn, lost, remade. They’re not policy, not even a slogan. They’re proof that ordinary people showed up and tried to make their presence visible without turning it into a brand.

The line “The only thing I wish I had kept” carries a quiet rebuke to the usual collector’s impulse. He isn’t craving memorabilia value; he’s missing a feeling of participation. The regret isn’t about losing stuff, it’s about losing a tactile link to a moment when public dissent felt communal, even a little joyful. “Hung them at protests” suggests a softness in the middle of confrontation - decoration as defiance, craft as counterpower.

Calling it “a wonderful thing” risks sentimentality, yet it lands because it’s so unstrategic. Selby, an actor trained in performance, is praising something that isn’t performance at all: anonymous labor, shared symbols, low-stakes beauty. In today’s protest culture, where attention is currency and merch is inevitable, the beads read like a reminder of how movements once made meaning with whatever was in reach - and how easy it is to misplace the artifacts that kept hope feeling real.