Signs

I took down my “Harris/Walz” yard sign today.

It was one of more than a dozen on our street this summer and fall, but it was the last one still out there nearly two weeks after Election Day.

I hadn’t meant to leave it out there so long. After Josh Shapiro beat the odious, Nazi-adjacent Doug Mastriano last year in Pennsylvania’s election for governor, I left our Shapiro sign out there for a couple of days to celebrate but then, as customary, I took it down before the week was over.

But I didn’t want to take down that “Harris/Walz” sign until after our next-door neighbor took hers down.

We’ve been neighbors for nearly 20 years and she’d never had any kind of sign out there before. But this year she did because of her son. This year, for no good reason, her son was being attacked, constantly, as some kind of dangerous threat to America. He was the focus of vicious ads that ran constantly here in Pennsylvania — ads attacking Kamala Harris and ads attacking Bob Casey, but more than that they were ads attacking him.

This makes no sense. He’s a good kid. A nursing student. Never been in any trouble or caused any trouble. Always looks after his mom. Just your basic good kid (well, not a kid anymore — he’s in his 20s now). I’ve raked leaves and shoveled snow with him for years. He’s always been a good neighbor.

I can’t imagine what this election was like for him, with people like him being constantly scapegoated and attacked in the nastiest terms, blamed for everything wrong with America as though any of our problems had anything to do with anyone like him.

Most of our neighborhood didn’t like those ugly, hateful ads. Most of our county — 56% — voted for Harris and Casey and voted against the ugly, hateful people running those ugly, hateful ads.

But almost 43% of our neighbors voted for that. And so did a majority of voters in the rest of Pennsylvania. And the good kid next door has to live with and among those people — people he’s never even met who hate him, passionately, and blame him for all of the problems in their own lives, problems he has never had anything to do with.

I can’t imagine what this past election was like for him. Or what the next four years will be like for him.

So I admired the defiant gesture from his mom of not just putting that sign out there on her lawn, but leaving it there, even after all the others came down. And so I left mine out there too, so she wouldn’t be alone.

She took that sign down yesterday, so mine is down now too. It was time. And so now it’s time to find other, more tangible and substantial ways to show them that they’re not going to be facing the next four years alone.

“I’ve got your back” is something I’ve been saying a lot lately. I mean it sincerely, but at the same time, neither I nor the people I’ve been saying it too really understand what exactly that is going to have to mean. Learning all that it will come to mean will likely not be pleasant.

But hey, you know, that’s the gig. We’re neighbors.