Turn them into folk art. This simple celebration sign took about thirty minutes.
Update, Monday, November 17, 2008: There's a bit of a political sign war in our neighborhood. I just read an e-mail on my neighborhood listserve from a disgruntled neighbor who wants us all to remove political signs from our yards. She quotes from the city code which evidently prohibits political signs in yards a week past an election. Self-righteously, the neighbor says that she removed her signs immediately after the election in order to "maintain a prettier neighborhood." Now she demands that everyone else remove their signs. Then another neighbor posted that the Georgia state legislature passed a law that pre-empts the city's code:
"no municipal, county, or consolidated government may restrict by regulation or other means the length of time a political campaign sign maybe displayed or the number of signs which may be displayed on private property for which permission has been granted."
O.C.G.A. Section 16-7-58(a)(2)
Could I get around the city code by calling my sign "folk art"? What prompts a person to take her neighbors to task so?
4 comments:
Cute! You did this?
Yes, I turned my political sign into garden art! I'll keep it up at least until the inauguration, maybe longer. Many Obama/Biden signs remain in yards in our neighborhood, but, well, I like to recycle trash into art, and I wanted something a little more celebratory, anyway.
Bet I know who the "neighbor" is! And, I'll bet she likes CAPTURED CATS only!
Your conclusion correctly recognizes a certain mindset, a 'policing' attitude. Some people just have to tell others what to do, to quote the rule book at them, so to speak. They get a self-righteous satisfaction out of doing so. However, in this case, I don't think this complaint is from the cat-capturing neighbors who take it upon themselves to uphold the city's code against wandering cats. (Woe to the pet owner whose cat escapes from its confined back yard or from the front door briefly left ajar.) And toward those neighbors, I do feel some sympathy if a stray cat becomes a continuous annoyance though I do not agree with the methods that would capture the cat who is an occasional miscreant--ummm.... to be fair, maybe because we have such a cat though we have put forth a lot of effort to keep that cat confined. (We have neighbors whose dog barks for hours, standing outside our kitchen window, facing our house. We've had to complain to them, nicely, that we're being driven insane by the unremitting noise.)
Compromises do have to be made when people live so close together. But the political sign complaint must not be from the cat-capturers because their McCain-Palin sign is still in their front yard.
Most of the signs in our neighborhood are Obama-Biden signs. This particular complaint reminds me of something M-M told me. As you know, she is a staff writer for the local high school magazine. In the latest publication, there's a two-page spread of high school teenagers dressed in political fashion, t-shirts, jeans, buttons, and signs that sport pictures or words promoting Obama's presidential campaign. Someone called the high school to complain that no other political candidates (McCain-Palin) were represented in the fashion photos.
"Did a lot of kids wear Obama t-shirts?" I asked M-M.
"Yes!" she replied, "all the time."
"Did you ever see a high school kid wearing something promoting John McCain?"
"No," she said emphatically.
So the kids who wanted to express their political opinions with what they wore tended to support Obama. The photo accurately represented the attitudes of the majority of those teens at the school.
But some reader thinks that the photograph should reflect some other reality.
Go figure.
Post a Comment