"The defiance of the drums and the sheer numbers of those who parade send out a single message: "This is our country too; we've arrived and we're staying. As one of the ethnic group involved, that is what the Twelfth means to me, not supremacy but equality and patriotism. We may be besieged but the gates have shut behind us and we haven't gone away, you know. What's more, we're not going to."
The words are those of Stephen Kelso, a unionist barrister and a committed Christian. His is one of a number of essays, written from different perspectives, and collected under the title, The Twelfth - What It Means To Me. Published in 1997 by the Ulster Society, in the wake of some of the worst violence at Drumcree, the short book was intended by its editors to "promote informed and intelligent debate and to generate a greater degree of mutual understanding".
There are a few nationalists among the contributors but, not surprisingly, the majority are unionists. Mr Kelso is not himself an Orangeman and expresses considerable unease about the tribal stance of the order and its failure on occasion to observe the Christian teaching to "live peaceably with all men". Yet he is drawn back every year to watch the parades.
He feels himself to be one of a "settler people" and expresses very vividly what the Twelfth means at a time of great uncertainty for his community.
"What's to become of us?" is a question which crops up in many of the contributions. People look back with an anguished sense of loss to the good old days when the Twelfth was a great day out.
They are uncomfortable with the violence associated with the parades and ask how this squares with the proclaimed devotion to religious and civil liberty. Why is it that the Orange Order is now seen across the world as identified with sectarian bigotry?
I suspect that at least a few of the moderate, middle-class unionists who contributed to this book have given the Orange parades a miss this year. They disapprove of the scenes that have accompanied Drumcree in the past and the intransigence shown in not talking to residents' groups. They see that this image does nothing to help the cause of unionism in Whitehall or Washington.
They make the point that policing Drumcree has cost millions of pounds which could be better spent on hospitals and roads.
The annual havoc shown on TV screens across the world deters would-be investors and damages the prospects for tourism.
In some ways the most striking aspect of this year's Drumcree has been the dogs that didn't bark. It has only been six years since David Trimble and the Rev Ian Paisley danced in triumph down the Garvaghy Road.
This time around the First Minister called for a halt to violent protests and even the Big Man deemed it prudent politically to stay away from Portadown.
Yet it would be quite wrong to write off the Orange Order as a spent force politically. As this year's parades have shown, many thousands of Northern Ireland Protestants still cling to it, finding comfort in the certainty of shared values in a world which seems to be shifting far too fast. Against this background the question "What's to become of us?" has an urgency which no politician, on either side of the Border, can afford to ignore.
The Belfast Agreement was designed, very carefully, to answer this question by offering both communities in Northern Ireland a degree of certainty about the future. This, it was hoped, would create a space in which politicians could learn to work together and to build mutual trust. To a considerable extent, this has worked for the nationalist community. They see representatives of the SDLP and Sinn Fein in government. But these gains for one side are seen as threatening losses by the other.
Many unionists, by no means all of them members of the Orange Order, are deeply sceptical about the Belfast Agreement and are not persuaded that it will ever guarantee their interests.
On the contrary, David Trimble's support in the Assembly has declined to the point that Dr Paisley can now claim that he and other anti-agreement parties represent the majority view within the unionist community.
This week's debate on the Police (Northern Ireland) Bill at Westminster is a case in point. Seamus Mallon may accuse the Northern Secretary, Peter Mandelson, of political chicanery in his handling of the Bill, but to many reasonably moderate unionists, it looks as though the RUC has been humiliated just at the time that the force is confronting loyalist violence on the streets.
As the week of the Twelfth draws to a close, the overwhelming reaction must be one of relief that it has passed with relatively little violence. There is hope that the proposals mapped out by the Parades Commission could lead to some form of dialogue, albeit through intermediaries, which would allow the Portadown Orangemen to walk down the Garvaghy Road.
This should not blind us to the serious political challenge posed by the protests of recent days.
Northern unionists, particularly those who live in deprived working-class ghettoes, have to be convinced that the Belfast Agreement is not a one-way street. It can work for them, too, in delivering a country where they can feel secure and at ease.