Missoula, Mont. -- On a clear, cold, sunny day, I walked this morning from Missoula's bus station to a motel on the opposite side of town. I've had to leave my apartment in Seattle for a couple of weeks while the building's management makes some long-overdue repairs. I'll stay for the duration at my sister's house in Butte.

But I stopped off here to look around a bit and -- probably -- to attend a rally scheduled for tomorrow evening at a local club. What struck me during my walk this morning is how little things have changed. It still mostly looks like the town where I went to college in the 70s. The town's edges have grown far beyond where they were when I lived here. I saw through the bus windows whole new housing developments, new big-box stores, and new shopping centers that weren't here even a few years ago. And the bus misses the other edge of town, farther south of I-90, where Missoula's most aggressive growth has occurred.

But, despite the sprawl of the edges, the center of this city -- like many of the  other small cities in Montana -- is stagnant. And stagnant, in this case, is good because the alternative faced by many other cities of similar size and sprawl is decay.

But even decay makes for visible change. Missoula's not-quite-vibrant, but nonetheless alive core hasn't changed much. The pedestrian core of this college town still offer pretty much the same vistas it did when I walked its sidewalks three decades ago.

That makes a few small changes more shocking. As I walked along Broadway this morning, I was stopped in my tracks by a bank. There's nothing remarkable about the bank itself or the building it's in, except that -- to my mind -- it's not supposed to be a bank. That's the 4 B's. For decades, the same building that now houses a bank with the same bank of plate-glass windows facing the street and the same small parking lot to the side was part of a local Montana-only chain of eateries that pretty much styled themselves on Denny's in both pricing and menu.

There were 4B's all around the state at one time, but this one was only blocks from the University of Montana campus and therefore hosted many a late-night end-of-term student study session. The specialty of the house was a pretty darn good strawberry pie that was cheap enough for a student budget.

But it's not a cafe anymore. It's a bank. And that's a bit jarring to me because I don't expect much to change in the parts of Montana that I know, which is mostly these central pedestrian parts of a couple of the cities.

Montana stays the same, I often feel.

That attitude is part of what the activists who will rally here tomorrow hope to influence. They want to change at least some of the attitudes in this place that takes pride in the moniker given to it by a Missoula author: Last Best Place.

Missoula now has an LBGT Community Center. It has a gay bar with another rumored to be opening. It is changing. But that change is resisted by some. The resistance became all too violently obvious early this month in two gay bashings. (Qnews summaries here, here, and here.)

The activists will try to do something, anything about it here with tomorrow's rally, just as activists in Seattle have scheduled a community meeting on Tuesday to talk about anti-gay violence on Capitol Hill.

It's not at all clear that activists talking forever about anti-gay violence will ever stop it. But the incident that inspired the current outpouring of concern here in Missoula shows that there is one place where talking does lead to changes. Even though she wasn't seriously injured, Jess Keith talked about her attackers. She talked to police. She talked to the media. And her good friend, Melissa, wrote about the attack on her blog, Written Rebellion, and talked to the media.

Remaining silent about attacks like these is a kind of approval of them. It's a way of saying they're something to be expected. Jess Keith didn't think that was the case. She wasn't about to let her attackers (or those like them) get away with their assault.

And that's a very important part of making the change that is required to stop bias crimes whether it's here in Missoula or in ever-changing Seattle on Capitol Hill.