Signage in the Exurbs

One Big Pickup blows by our mailbox, leaves scuttled in the flurry, our Obama sign buffeted by the back draft. I watch the sign wobble, a tiny residual shudder, then resume its short mute vigil by our driveway. I feel a quick relief that the sign is fine and that I don’t have to get mad at the truck and its disappearing threat. I don’t have to take a picture of the downed sign and send it to our local newspaper in impotent, printed outrage.
Instead, I’m watching the quiet morality play in our town, the lines of yard signs that flank some roads, the empty stretches on others, the partisan punctuation on that street, the bipartisan parable on another - the permission that signs give exurbanites to signal their views when they won’t speak their minds. The oddest thing about living in the outer rings of the US in the millennium is that people in these towns are afraid to say what they think to each other.
We moved here in 2004, certain that this country would elect John Kerry, and we were excited and positively noisy about it. We were stunned not to be able to chatter excitedly with new acquaintances and neighbors about the imminent end to the patently destructive Bush era. This is Massachusetts and Kerry was going to win this state. But weirdly, decidedly, confusingly, no one wanted to talk about it.
I agree that Kerry was not an ideal standard-bearer. But Bush is unbearable. What’s not to talk about? But when Kerry lost we stopped trying to talk, and I draped our front porch with black cloth for three days. I don’t think anyone noticed, or got it, until I tried to explain it. (To less people, with less vigor.) And there were so few yard signs up anyway for that election, that little changed on the roadsides afterwards. The fall leaves and the stones walls remained uninvolved. I wondered what people were talking about inside their houses.
In 2008, however, yard signs abound, staking their claims on some of these roads. It seems people do need to declare themselves after all, but do so by posted witness and not spoken word. Any political conversations are still tentative unless you know you are in like-minded company. The better part of valor out here is still expected and track meet chat and bus stop civilities remain bare of political opinions, rather than full-dress encounters spent baring beliefs. Having convictions in this setting doesn’t connote convincing a partisan opposite. Now convictions more mean quietly claiming your ground as firmly as those metal yard sign poles get staked out in front of your house. What is odd is that the audible silence seems all the more fervent, and the polarity more distinct. The middle ground of discourse is impossible without conversation. Instead, the yards signs speak for us, but, like all inanimate objects, can’t speak with each other.
And when the signs come down and this election is over, I think that more of us will either speak less to some of us, or we will speak to each other, but mean even less. We won’t be able to use sign language.