Made it into LA just in time for what photographers call “the Golden Hour” just before sunset. Put these up on the eastbound Santa Monica freeway between La Brea and Arlington, starting with this one:
Followed by this:
And then this:
Checked into a cheap motel and saw this on twitter, letting me know the sign I put up four days ago in San Francisco was still there (110,000 cars per day.) That sign took me about eight minutes to make and cost less than a nickel. This is why I say that protest signs work better when you don’t hold them.
Oh yeah, here’s another cool picture. Put this up in Oakland on the 580. It has two wire coat-hangers duct-taped to the top, so putting it up was just a matter of hanging it on the fencing and strapping one large bungee cord across the back. Took literally 15 seconds.
Saw it was still up 24 hours later. I wish I could describe how that feels — seeing a really big sign you put up still there the next day and knowing tens of thousands of people had seen it — because if I could describe it, I mean really describe it, you’d start doing it yourself. Anyway, until I become a better writer you’ll just have to trust me: it feels damn good.
Here’s how some of these looked when I painted them:
And here’s a bunch more.
Each of these pictures represents an hour or two of lazily tracing letters, painting them in and listening to music. It’s incredibly cathartic: I’d recommend doing it even if you end up just throwing the damn things away.
Just in case you’ve forgotten, here’s how to make signs:
And here’s how to hang them.
Or, if you find an overpass like this…
Okay, that’s enough tutorial. Here’s the latest batch of signs from around the country. All of them by women.
Above and below courtesy of suevisa in Oakland. I’ve just turned her on to the miracle of cardboard — now she’ll be able to make ten signs in the time it took her to make one.
Another convert is PDX_Resists.
Tired of standing on streetcorners, she traded in her posterboard and Sharpies for whitewashed bike boxes, black paint and a projector. Now instead of reaching her neighborhood for an hour or two, she’s protesting 24/7 on Interstates 5, 405 and 84, from the comfort of her own home!
Allow me to introduce @Larkworthy
She got a projector too. Now she’s the voice of southwest Washington State.
See, you don’t just do it. You do it over and over again: each time getting a little faster, a little better, a little more efficient. Because 1) it’s a good idea and 2) because it’s fun.
Here’s some newbies:
And Elsie in Jacksonville Florida:
The next three are from @thorbites
And the rest are from @Rose_glow1
She got a projector, painted signs and then started putting them up where they’ll be seen. Now a couple of hundred thousand southern Californians are seeing protest signs where they used to see empty fence. Imagine if more of us started doing this.
And I’m pretty sure “a couple of hundred thousand” is lowballing it.