Sign of the Times - Obama Home Sign Desecrated in California

About a month ago I was driving down winding Fair Oaks Boulevard in suburban Sacramento, California with my two younger children. We noticed a painter hard at work on a large expanse of fence in front of one of the affluent homes that dot that portion of the boulevard. The entire fence, five large sections six feet high, was being repainted white, and large stenciled letters were appearing. When we drove back later we could see the letters spelled out "Obama" in very large print on each section. I smiled broadly when I noted how happy the sight of the sign made my two children. They believe Barack Obama is a good man, a principled man. Like them, he has a white mother and his father was of Muslim heritage, from Africa. My daughter, the middle child and the intellectual of the bunch, has read everything she can about him and she listens to his speeches, reads his website. She proudly carries a bright blue bag to school with his image emblazoned on it. She reminds me of my older sister Kathy, who had the image of Robert F. Kennedy everywhere when she was about the same age my daughter is now. Barack Obama symbolizes the hope and ethics that Robert F. Kennedy symbolized for my older sister. Yes, there is an element of hero worship, but more than that, there is a firm belief in the vision expressed and exhibited by the Senator, in one case a 42 year old with hair tending to fall into his eyes as he went to poor towns all over the country and met with people whose lives were harder than he could ever have imagined, and in the other case by the tall, 48 year old with closely cropped hair who knocked on doors in working class neighborhoods and asked for votes while asking folks to share their concerns with him.

I was a very small child in 1968. My parents were liberal Democrats who believed firmly in the vision of Robert Kennedy to serve your fellow man and your country and to expect your country to work even harder for the downtrodden than it did for the wealthy. I remember my mother, a woman of restraint, a shy person who was soft spoken - literally dancing into our living room on the day President Johnson announced he was withdrawing from the presidential race. My tiny mother, towering at five feet two inches, danced and danced and sang, "It's Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy, all the way!". She had a difficult relationship with my two oldest sisters, young teenagers whose ideas and habits frightened her and in some way challenged her own values. But, on that day she took the hands of my sister Kathy and they danced together. At their core they had something in common, a belief in their obligation to their fellow man, a sense of hope for the direction the younger brother of the slain President would lead our country in, and a sense of purpose as citizens that they had something to contribute, that they brought something of value to the process, the community, the country.

All these long years later as I dorve slowly by the large, proud signs bearing Obama's name in an upperclass area that is predominantly Republican and definitely predominatently white, a bt of that hope caught in my chest. I too live in a Republican neighborhood, a conservative neighborhood. I haven't voted for a Democrat for state senator or Assemblyman in years, and when the presidential race was in its nascence and I saw Hillary Clinton as the Democratic frontrunner, almost ordained, I was happy when Fred Thompson entered the Republican fray. By the time the primary came to California, however, Thompson was long gone and Obama was poised to overtake Hillary. I began to take him seriously. I began to listen. I had trepidation on his ability to deliver, but I became more and more impressed with not just his intellect, but his personal ethics. The way he conducted his campaign, the way he comported himself, were reminiscent of a bygone era of civility. My children, like my older sisters all those years ago, are more attuned to the message, and that is fine. The message is a good message, a reasurring one and a challenging one. That bold sign along some twenty-five feet of fence reminded me that values, courage, vision, are not strictly the provenance of an age group or a political party. I knew that homeowner would face some flak from his neighbors. The McCain-Palin signs, little blue ones, began to dot the street farther down from his house. But his sign said, "I am proud of my choice". It said he was standing up, shouting, if you will, that he shared that vision.

I drive by that Obama sign two or three times a week. It always makes me smile. It reminds me of the flak my sister got, four years after Bobby Kennedy's death, when she dared to sink a McGovern sign into my parents front lawn. I live in the same neighborhood now that my parents lived in back in 1972. We are wrapped around a country club, gardeners come every morning, their blowers and mowers hard at work to keep everything neatly manicured. In 1972 some exhuberant young boys from nearby, farther up the block from my parents modest home, yanked the McGovern sign out of the lawn and tossed it into the garbage. It was a Nixon neighborhood. The only other McGovern sign for blocks was on the lawn of the convent at our Catholic school (the rectory up the hill had a Nixon sign in hte window). My sister was very upset about the vandalism, but my father talked to the boys, explained to my sister that people can get pretty heated about political issues. He said she could get a new sign, they were sorry for what they'd done. And that sign remained unmolested even after one of the biggest landslide losses in modern American politics..

As I drive through my neighborhood now there are actually more Obama signs on lawns than McCain-Palin signs, but most homes have no signs at all. My home doesn't. In some spots there are competing signs across the street from each other. I have not seen any signs plucked though. Every morning as the wild turkeys leave the country club for their daily constitutional through the well groomed lawns and up and down the quiet streets, they may wonder about the new spots of color here and there, but otherwise the politial signs are unremarked upon.

Not so that large display on toney Fair Oaks Boulevard. Monday night it was hidesously vandalized with racists slogans that were all the more hateful for how many of them there were and the reality they stretched out for twenty five feet along a well travelled road. I watched the news last night and saw the homewoner, a white man in his late 30s or early 40s, carefully painting over the slogans. Neighbors commented on what a shameful display the vandalism had been.
I think it is much more than that. I drive by all sorts of political signs every day. I walk through them when I walk my dogs. People vote for who they vote for, they support this or that ballot measure. Unless there is something untoward on a sign it doesn't even catch my attention. Live and let live. Respect the views of others.

I remember what it was like in 1972. I remember how heated things were with a war still raging on even as defeat seemed imminent. I remember the clash of ideals. I was ten years old, but ours was a historically and politically educated household. It was also the year of the McGovern mistake, when he withdrew Thomas Eagleton as his vice presidential choice. It was four years after Bobby Kennedy's assassination, four years after milquetoast Hubert Humphrey lost to Richard Nixon. Mistrust of government was not yet at an all time high, but displeasure was pretty evident. In times like that fear does motivate. Those boys who lived up the street played golf with their dads, had nice cars, were looking forward to the colleges of their choice. They couldn't fathom the large family crowded into the three bedroom rental at the end of the street being 'proud' to support a liberal Democrat who would ruin their wy of life. So, they yanked the sign. And then they were sorry. Their own parents told them we might be misguided down the street, but we were entitled to express our views the same as they were.
And the truth is, thirty-six years later, nobody's way of life changed one way or the other due to that election, nor would it have had George McGovern somehow won against all odds against an incumbent president during time of war. We pulled troops out in 1973, and in 1975, when Saigon finally fell, the 60s and all their idealism ended. That his was taking place against the backdrop of the Watergate hearings and the resignation of the sitting president was certainly historical, but not way of life changing.

What is different today that people will come to someone's home and vandalize their personal property so viciously with such hateful, racist graffiti. It was a hard slap in the face to anyone who passed by, anyone who saw it. It wasn't yanking a yard sign, it was desecrating a symbol not just of someone's choice of candidate, but of inclusion. It was a rebuke to a way of life in a way normal graffiti or normal pranks are not. The violence wasn't just to the idea of Obama as president, but to the idea of support for any non-white candidate. It was a violent swipe at a white man's optimism and openness. It didn't say you are wrong-headed in your political choice - it pounded that homeowner's ideals into the ground. It pounded Obama into the ground. And that was the intention.

That fence is near my house. It is in my town. When I saw the graffiti, as my son and I drove by on our way home, I was glad he had closed his eyes, was tired after the long day at school and aftercare. I was most relieved that my daughter wasn't with us. She would know the graffiti was meant to be personalized for her, for every African American and she would take it to heart in a way my son does not yet. And that sign made me invisible the way it makes so many white mothers invisible. Twenty-one years ago my husband told me I would be giving up my race by marrying him, having his children. "You will always have one foot in this doorway," he said, "and once you've stepped inside you can't pretend you've never been here." Of course I can't. But that graffiti made me invisible because it reinforced that race is all that is seen by some. That graffiti was the Muslim rumors, the Kenyan connection, the 'he's going to take out the man' innuendo. It was all the undercurrent laid bare. It was what makes people have to assure you they are not their heritage, they are simply who they are now - not who their people have been in the past. That graffiti loudly declared that no one is the totality of their ethnic or familial roots, but we are black or white - nothing in between but a broad chasm that the graffiti artists wanted to preserve.

You don't have to be black to understand the violence of such an assault. You don't have to be the mother of a black family. You could be that man who wanted a custom painted sign to express his choice, his principles. I doubt that his vote for Obama is based on race, but the graffiti is. I am not the six or ten year old child watching through wide eyes and listening intently to my parents and my older siblings discussions about politics. I am a middle-aged woman, a political veteran. I am conservative in my personal habits and my fiscal views. When I looked finally at Barack Obama as a serious candidate for President of the United States it was his intelligence, his words, his experience and his views that interested me, not his race. I am a realist though, and of course at some point I had to factor his race into the equation and never did it occur to me that this country or its people would be so backwards as to so violently discount and discredit any human being primarily because of his race. That attack on the biggest Obama sign in the area screams right out loud the whispers and hushed dialogue we've all heard month after month. Well, it's out in the open. It is hurtful, damaging to the core of who we are as a people. My father was not afraid my sister or any of his children would be personally harmed by boys with different political views than those of our parents pulling a sign out of our yard. But I know my children will be. I know that I am. That graffiti said there still isn't a place for us.