Sign, Sign, Everywhere a Social Justice Yard Sign
They ubiquitous, they’re banal, they’re annoying…
Perhaps you’ve seen ’em.
If you live in the burbs – Brookside, Prairie Village, Mission Hills, Leawood, Platte City or Parkville -I think you know what I’m talking about.
Those ubiquitous, post George Floyd, post riots, post defund the police black yard signs that read as follows:
WE BELIEVE
BLACK LIVES MATTER
NO HUMAN IS ILLEGAL
LOVE IS LOVE
WOMEN’S RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS
SCIENCE IS REAL
There might be a Land Rover, Mercedes or Tesla in the upscale suburban driveway that home owners wouldn’t dare desecrate with a political bumper sticker, yet they’ve got these colorful, attention drawing signs smack in the middle of their front yard.
The bottom line?
“These are just mindless generalities,” says Mission Hills attorney Dwight Sutherland. “Water is life, love is love. How do you answer that? It’s just verbal flatulence – it doesn’t mean anything – who can argue with statements like that? But beneath the amorphous generalities there lurk very real, very ugly, very extreme policies that they are intended to conceal.”
“They sound profound, but they’re actually just platitudes and they’re so broad that they’re meaningless. Just like in the 1960s when you heard all these sayings like, ‘give peace a chance’ and ‘what if they gave a war and nobody came?’ Do you think if you lived in Russia, Cuba or Vietnam you could be a conscientious objector? They’d put you up against a wall.”
More to the point, why have these signs have become so effing popular?
“This is all anti-Donald Trump,” Sutherland says. “It’s a fad, because for the hip, pseudo-intellectuals, it’s the thing to do because they hate Trump. No wonder Orwell called left wing intellectuals ‘The Herd of Independent Minds’.”
Let’s break it down:
NO HUMAN IS ILLEGAL:
“That’s means open the borders,” Sutherland says. “As Jay Leno said, undocumented immigrants is code for unregistered Democrats. So anyone who is already here should get amnesty, citizenship and full voting rights. They want them to come here so they can vote and convert the nation to a one party state. Then the fun will really begin, a reign of terror against anyone who doesn’t bow down to-or take a knee to -the Gods of Political Correctness. Do we really want to enshrine a movement whose chief spokesman is Al Sharpton? ”
SCIENCE IS REAL:
“That’s climate change ,i.e. the Green New Deal,” Sutherland says. “But now it’s taken on another meaning, that we have to shut the country down until we get a coronavirus vaccine, which will be during the Joe Biden administration. Just like Trump got the blame for Covid. Never mind that 182 countries have suffered from the pandemic.”
LOVE IS LOVE:
“That’s LGBTQ, so transgender men can use women’s bathrooms and participate in women’s sports. We also need to get away from binary pronoun use. They also should have guarantied Women’s Reproductive Health Care,i.e. access to a tax payer funded abortion for people who don’t have a uterus and cannot conceive. Forget gay marriage, that’s yesterday’s news. Like Joe Biden says, transexual rights is the civil rights issue of our time.”
KINDNESS IS EVERYTHING:
“We do this because we love people and are compassionate. That’s why we burn down cities and throw bricks at cops. It may not look like it, but we’re doing it out of compassion – we care about Humanity with a capital H!”
FEMINISM IS FOR EVERYONE:
“That’s the same as women’s rights. It’s about abortion, including up to and after birth. Abortion is the sacrament of liberalism, a blood sacrifice 0n the twin altars of feminism and sexual liberation.”(Dr. Bollier,call your office!)
BE KIND TO ALL:
“It’s a concept of liberals, embracing love and humanity in the abstract, so you don’t have to relate or be respectful of individual people. It’s embraced by moronic suburban women who want to be seen as caring, nice people. In the case of males, it’s because they hate Trump and as an educated professional, they look down on The Great Unwashed,i.e. those who didn’t go to college to read ‘White Fragility’ and Ta Nehisi Coates. It”s a class signifier – like driving a Volvo with a BKS sticker and living in Brookside.”
BLACK LIVES MATTER
“That’s because black lives matter more than everyone else’s life – because of their unique victim status. (But only if they can be said to have been killed by the police using excessive force and thus provide a usable political moment for the Democratic Party and the racial grievance industry. Otherwise no 0ne on the Left cares. Look at all the black children killed in drive by shootings that are ignored by the liberal politicians and press.)
“Progressive politics is all about using your guilt for being racist,sexist,classist, genderist, et al.to make you turn over money and power to those attacking you in hope that they will spare you in the end. It’s like those dinner parties where white liberal women pay $2,500 to two women of color to come into their homes and lambast them for being implicitly racist. You can’t even cry when you admit your guilt because tears are a form of White Privilege. It’s those reports right after BLM started from puzzled African-Americans that they were getting money from white people they barely knew for no apparent reason. It’s called protection money from the cowardly. Maybe these yard signs are like the”Soul Brother” signs merchants put in their store windows during ghetto riots in the ’60s, in the hopes that they would be spared.”
So will Sutherland put his yard signs where his mouth is with Trump / Blue Lives Matter?
“Effing yes,” he says. “I’m getting ready to put up a Trump banner with a spotlight on it and play country music at full volume – Toby Keith – on election night.”
Kidding?
“No, I’m not. Not after the investment banker across the street put up a black lives matter flag-I’m taking off the gloves.”
Another way to look at the folks who feel the need to plant these signs:
Does the word poser from the French “poseur” ring any bells?
“A poseur is someone who poses for effect, or behaves affectedly, who affects a particular attitude, character or manner to impress others, or pretends to belong to a particular group. A poseur may be a person who pretends to be what they are not or an insincere person. They may have a flair for drama or behave as if they are onstage in daily life.”
What’s that expression: if the shoe fits.