It was about the first of February this year when my wife, Jennifer, and I both embraced Barack Obama as our presidential candidate. We haven't regretted it since. In fact, our respect and admiration for this man grows every day. With every ridiculous smear and attempt at character assassination that he endures and, in fact, turns around into an advantage, we grow to like him even more. The idea that anyone could take the kind of pummeling he has taken - because of his race, because of his religious background, because of his name, because of you-name-it - and still keep forging ahead with wisdom and humor and grace truly astounds us. Jennifer says he reminds her of Kennedy. I tell her we haven't had something this appealing come down the pike for as long as I can remember.
Well, by mid February we had both come to like Obama so much that I decided to put up a lawn sign. We live in a rural part of North Central Florida. With no primary here that counted for anything, no lawn signs were to be had that I could find. So I decided to make my own. I ordered 10 Obama rally signs (the hand held variety) from a website along with a couple of Obama buttons. I got a package delivered a few days later.
The next day I screwed together a homemade lawn sign out of some scrap lumber and plywood, attached one of the Obama rally signs to each side of it with thumb tacks, and stuck it in the ground at the end of the driveway.
Bear in mind that we live in the country and that the road is a bit of a ways from our house. Because of trees and brush and a bend in the driveway, there's no way to see the lawn sign from our house. Not that I thought there was any reason to keep an eye on it. It was just another political lawn sign as far as I could see. People put them out all the time. No biggee.
Three and a half weeks went by. Then one morning when I drove out to get my morning paper, our Barack Obama for President sign was gone. Not pushed over, not defaced, just gone. My first thought was that there must be some reasonable explanation. There was some brush on the ground that I couldn't remember being there before. I thought maybe some county truck had backed over it while clearing brush. Or maybe the mail delivery person had run over it by accident.
But there was no debris, no piece of our lawn sign anywhere to be found. Someone had taken it. I remember, as this realization dawned on me, that I was experiencing feelings similar to ones I'd had at various times in my life when my house had been broken into and robbed. It's the same feeling of violation when one realizes one's constitutional right to free expression is being abridged. I felt an irrational (well, maybe not that irrational) anger that lasted less than a day. Then I got busy making another sign.
I had given away a couple of the rally signs but I still had four left. I made another lawn sign out of plywood and two-by-twos nearly identical to the first one with the exception of longer legs so i could pound it farther into the ground with my sledge hammer (that would stop that thief!). Once again I thumb-tacked the rally signs to the plywood.
I carried this replacement lawn sign to the end of the driveway and pounded it in. About a week later we came out and found one side of the sign nearly ripped off and hanging by a thread. We replaced it and repinned it avoiding ripped corners. That was about a week ago. This morning, when I left to get my paper, the sign was gone again.
It's difficult to describe the feelings one experiences when someone takes away your rights. Someone anonymous. It's like being victimized by a thief as I said before. I try to imagine how a person like this thinks. Somehow, he believes he is justified in this act he carries out in the middle of the night, under the cover of darkness, depriving me of my right to support the candidate of my choice. Who is he to tell me I cannot express my support for Barack Obama? Who is he to take away my free speech?
After finding the second version of my lawn sign stolen this morning, I was angrier than I would have thought possible, almost raging. But once again it only lasted for about an hour. Then I went to work. I pulled two heavy 8 ft pressure treated 4x4's out from behind my barn. I cut a piece of thick 3/4 inch plywood for the backboard. I went to our local lumber yard and fetched bolts and readi-mix concrete. I bolted my new heavy duty sign together, glued the rally signs to the backboard with contact cement, dug some holes with a posthole digger, and sunk the legs of my new industrial strength lawn sign 24 inches deep and buried in 200 pounds of concrete. It took me most of the day.
I have to go online tomorrow and order more rally signs. If this cowardly jerk thinks I'm going to give up before he does, he's nuts. I may be building a billboard at the end of my driveway before this is done. I'll probably run into code violations.
Note: I tried embedding a couple of photos in this diary but I'm evidently doing it wrong. If someone could tell me in the comments how to do that, I would appreciate it.