Yard Sign Considerations

Ours wasn’t the only Clinton-Kaine yard sign that was stolen the other day.   In addition to our neighbors directly across the road, two others were taken just on this short stretch of our road, making for a total of eight pilfered of the signs that G. had posted in this part of the county.  The Republican Trump-Pence signs, of course, hadn’t been touched.

Since then, my wife, who works in the Democratic office in the county seat, has gotten two replacement signs, one for us and one for our neighbors.  But I am being slow to display ours, because I’m still considering strategies. It would damage my faith in my fellow citizens in this usually quite civil county even more if another sign was snatched just as quickly, which I believe would be sure to happen, so unusually fierce is the Republican antagonism this time around, all because this time they have a candidate who is tripping bigtime, and the numerous sniffs that he emitted during the debates were only one of the factors that testified to his condition and possibly also to the sources of his feverish and disjointed states of mind.

One strategy that I considered was to show my sign only in the daytime, as I was certain that the thefts had occurred at night.   But then G.K. told me that all his signs were taken in the middle of the day!

Still I decided that the new sign wasn’t doing any good lying in my disabled pickup truck, and at around noon yesterday I set it up in a big oak half-barrel that normally holds only part of our impatiens flower collection and that sits just off the road up at the head of our somewhat steep driveway.   There I could still check on it from way down at the bottom of the driveway, across from my workshop, which I did throughout the rest of the day, until, near sunset, I went up and brought the sign back down to the truck, for the night.  Today I plan to again set it in the impatiens tub first thing in the morning, and leave it there all day.

G.K. said that he had installed what is called a “game camera” to keep an eye on his sign, and after 4 or 5 days, when both his sign and the camera could have been taken, they hadn’t been touched.   But I had only now even heard of game cameras, which apparently are mostly used so that people can watch the wild animal life on their property from their homes or even from their offices at work, and I don’t have such a nicety of modern tech.

Though I’m not supposed to be getting on a ladder of any kind and going up any height, I have nevertheless been giving strong consideration to bringing a ladder up there and hanging my sign from one of the tree branches that reach almost over the edge of the road.  Yard sign vandals have been known to rip the plastic off the wire frames in that case, but this would at least force them to haul their vastly over-sized behinds out of their cars and find some way to reach that high.

In any case, in this silent discussion that I’ve been having with the thugs, if my sign in the oak tub is also ripped off by some Trump supporter with severe anger issues for which he should seek help,  I’ll just get one more replacement and start displaying it only on Nov 4, four days before the voting. 

Meanwhile I am highly aggrieved that I feel it necessary to go through all this, when I, on the other hand, have never even thought of tampering with anyone’s yard sign.   Nor have I contemplated or done anything else of that kind during a very long lifetime, except state my opinions in no uncertain terms on this blog, which no one but me ever sees, though Blogger does say that it gets a few page views every day.  But no comments are ever left here, which I guess is just as well.

The Trumpistas would be highly gratified if they knew of how easily their criminal acts aggrieve me, so I am only left with never wishing them well.   

Actually people would be surprised if they knew how often that really works for me, and in a number of ways!