Lawn Art

For reasons that are directly related to the state of the world today, I have decided I need to change the magnet on the back of my car.  Also, to get a lawn sign.  

I know, I'm basically a national hero over here.

Look, as things get worse out there I think it’s more and more
important to be clear and public about where you stand on some things.  This is especially true, I believe, as a white person.  This is not the time to keep your head down and just hope for the best.  I’m pretty sure neither my lawn nor my bumper are going to change the world, but work with me here, Reader. 

The car magnet I currently have is an American flag.  As of this writing, it’s on the fridge, not the car.  Let me be crystal clear about three things:

1) I love my country very much.  I love the ideals she was built on if not the materials she was built out of.  I believe in America, and I think it’s important to remember that ESPECIALLY now with everything going on.  The Far Right doesn’t get to corner the market on patriotism.  

2) I put that magnet on my car in the first place so that I would remember what this country is supposed to be, and to challenge myself not to let my bitterness and anger about her current state turn into bitterness and anger about her potential.  It’s been a struggle.

3) It seems to me that, for myself, I need that message to have a little more nuance these days.  I mean, Reader, white lady with an American flag magnet on her car in 2019, what do YOU assume about her when you drive by?   What message do YOU assume she is amplifying?  And therefor: what message AM I amplifying?  

Is it her.....................or them
that you assume is driving the car?

So I want to give that message some….tone.

This finds me here, looking for perhaps a sticker or other magnet to supplement or give context to the one now on the fridge.  Because this is the part of the story where it feels uncomfortable to represent myself as a patriot, without clarifying what kind of patriot.  (Here's a hint: not this kind.)

This was my favorite bumper sticker
 I'd ever seen for YEARS.

 I have a real concern that what I am amplifying is the lies, hatred, white supremacy, bigotry, and cruelty that is running rampant out there wearing all the trappings of patriotism.  I do want to support what this country could be, should be.  So here we are.

Gonna rock it til the wheels fall off.

In the field of possible car decoration, there are many options.  I’ve never had stickers on my car, even funny ones, sort of for the same reason I don’t have visible tattoos.  I certainly appreciate them on your car, Reader, but what if that’s not how

This is true even though it's about my cat.

I’m feeling at every stoplight on every day, for all the years it takes me to drive my little car into the ground, which I intend to be many??  I mean I don’t even wear earrings.  Deciding to permanently accessorize my car is complicated.  My life is so difficult. 

“Andy” is on board with lawn signage assuming it’s not just value-signaling self-congratulating progressive trappings, and I agree—despite the vast courage and expense it requires to put a stupid sign in my yard, the goal here is not to sleep better at night patting myself on the back cuz I solved racism and fought off oppression.  I do hope to signal to my neighborhood where we stand.  I do think it’s important right now to be public about that stance.  I want to be actively boosting signals of love and justice.  I think a lawn sign is not a heavy lift.

This is not the kind of sign I am looking for but how effing adorable is it????

How does one begin a search for yard signs (and car magnets) that properly convey the messages I am looking for?  Well, one starts by going to Etsy!

On Etsy one can type in, say, “in this house we believe in” and see what happens.  What happens is a lot of versions of the following:

If this is the right sign for YOU, Reader, it can be found here!

I’m into it but it feels a little...idk, on the nose.  Too broad, too..."LOOK AT HOW PROGRESSIVE I AM".  Something.  I keep looking.

One can also type in “political yard signs” and be greeted with an array of choices.  Most of them are pretty left leaning but honestly I don’t know if that’s real or if the algorithms clocked me and Etsy knows what it should and shouldn’t show me if it wants my money and also for me not to rage-quit the internet.  

For example.....

Some of these signs are angry and funny and snarky, but that’s not what we’re looking for here.  I mean, I am usually angry, sometimes funny, and definitely snarky.  But the goal is not to amplify division and anger (even funny anger).  

Alright, Etsy...I forgive you.
Is this the right sign for YOU, Reader? It can be found here!

So something kinder….but not some “be kind plsthx” mess that really only confirms that I am a suburban white woman and is not at all doing the thing I am trying to do here.  Which is obviously changing the world one neighbor-walking-the-dog-who-glances-at-our-house at a time.

There are also some particularly timely options which feel right until I remember our news cycle is about 45 seconds long these days and the second I put this in my yard I will need to also put up this and then this.

As a conscientious consumer, one must also consider where one's money goes.  The big, makes-everything business who does this on the cheap?  The black lady in Oregon, a state that had a white’s only law on the books until (wait for it) 1922?  The small business owner dude with the beard and the man bun?  The lady who also makes conservative stickers?   They’re all just trying to make a buck, feed their family, live their lives.  But also I get to pick who I give my money to.

So now I’m looking for the Holy Grail of lawn signs.  Beware all ye who enter the realm of seeking grace through signage, lo may many false idols entrap you.  Including overthinking the sign you put in your yard that doesn’t change lives and also probably no one notices.

Also including trying to find grace in a sign in the first place.

On the car sticker side, there’s a whole next level of snark and anger, which I often get a chuckle out of on other cars but don’t necessarily want on my own for reasons discussed above.  Worth mentioning, there are some other concerns when we’re talking about car statements.   I travel a lot for work, wayyyyy down the pig trails into the rural parts of the state.  To do my job, the one that pays me my monies, the one that I agreed to do on the road in my car, I need to have work-appropriate opinions on my bumper that do not represent our organization in a way that might endanger our efficacy or reputation.  Plusalso I don’t want to get in a fight at a gas station or a 2-star motel in East Bajezus, Georgia.  But like, some things we all agree with, right? 

But do we?  

In 2016, I went to a BLM march in downtown.
On the way home in my Black Lives Matter t shirt,
I stopped at my local RaceTrac
and as I walked across the parking lot
in the safe suburban neighborhood where I lived,
someone yelled out at me,
"Hey, were you down there with all them n*****s?"

And when I looked for them, I couldn't find them.
And that was not way down the pig trails.

Are my bumper stickers something I'm supposed to tell my boss about?  Is this what it feels like to suddenly worry you won’t “pass” in risky social situations? 

I lived in the 6^th district when Jon Ossoff was running.  I remember watching a story unfold—a conservative local man in what he (I, we all) presumed to be a solidly ruby red district was seeing all these lawn signs go up for Ossoff.  He was flummoxed, and was calling for, if I remember correctly, the city to something about it.  He posited—like, Reader, walk with me on this journey. 
He thought this through and decided this made the most sense, this was the logical conclusion he came to, and believed it enough to complain to the powers that be—that a secret cadre of Unscrupulous Liberals were, under cover of darkness, sneaking signs onto properties of good, hard working, tax-paying Regular People, who were themselves so busy with the day-to-day grind that they weren’t noticing so weren’t taking the offending signs down.  Thus these crafty, low down, morally bankrupt ne’er-do-wells were misrepresenting the amount of support Ossoff had in the district as well as abusing their fellow decent citizens’ first amendment rights.  And the city should do something about it.

The truth was, Ossoff had a lot more support on the ground than everyone had assumed.  Seeing those signs gave me hope.  They especially gave me hope considering that, a year earlier coming up on the presidential election, I was on a locked down super-secret liberal Facebook page where we would privately root for Clinton and against Trump, and express our opinions publicly irl only through the timidest of ways.  Paint one fingernail blue.  Rearrange the paint-at-home letters in the arts and crafts isle at Target to say HRC.  Wear red one day.  Quiet, tiny stuff like that.

Like this, but political.

And that tiny stuff, Reader—when you stumbled upon it in the wild, it felt amazing.  Having assumed yourself to be alone, you were instead suddenly aware you were a part of something bigger.  Broadly unseen, but present.  It felt good. Again, it felt like hope.

Anyway, so now we’re getting a lawn sign.  I can do my tiny timid part for hope, right?  And STILL do the other, bigger things.  We’re getting it from Etsy, from a small business owner I want to give my money to (spoiler alert: it’s Oregon).  I’m not exactly setting the bar for freedom fighter over here, but given how I spent last week in a ball under the table, it’s something.  The person that the sign is really talking to is me, reminding me that I have a voice and challenging me to use it.

I'm thinking about getting one for the garden too.

We Build.

I have heard it said—well, to be honest, I have seen it float by on a Facebook meme—that to garden is to have hope. 

 

The early days

I have a garden.  I have black eyed peas, and cantaloupe, and carrots and beets, and of course eggplant.  I have a whole plot of squash and pumpkins that are overrun with squash beetles because I didn’t know what I was happening, I didn’t understand the problem, so I didn’t do anything about it.  They are going to die because nothing was done in time. 

They are going to die because nothing was done in time.

Everything else is doing great. 

I have a garden.  They say that is hope.

It is hard, sometimes these days, to have hope.  I have been taking it easy on social media recently, so I missed El Paso and Dayton until after the fact.  Not far after, but I caught them both at once, not as they happened.  Same thing had happened with the Garlic Festival, a few days before.  And while these things were happening, I was just…living.  Being a friend, having friends.  Being a spouse, having a spouse.  Being a worker and going to work.  Having nice days.  Trying to have nice days.

It is hard to look at the world right now and understand what is happening, and what the correct response is.  It is hard for me to look at all the things screaming out, and know what the correct thing to do is.  I mean, outrage and disapproval are clear correct responses.  To more mass shootings, to race baiting from on high, to children in cages and internment camps made in my name as a US citizen.  Yes.  Outrage, and disapproval. 

But that’s not an action. 

That’s a feeling, a vast and righteous but also completely overwhelming feeling that doesn’t come with an instruction manual.  I’m going to vote, yes, but that sure doesn’t feel like a meaningful-thing-to-do-today action.  I give money where I can, but I can’t much.  I call when I can, but to be honest, I do it less than it demands.  I forget sometimes. I get busy, plusalso I don’t like it, and that’s shameful but it’s also true.  In the meantime, I try and live a life full of love, and to love radically.  But like…that’s not exactly putting your body up as the hurdle that injustice must climb over. 

And I don’t know what else to do.

So I go to the garden, and I ask myself, what am I building?

I try to build a marriage.  I try to build a village of love, support, acceptance.  I try to build hope.  I try to tend my garden. 

I am a fighter, but no one really wants to have to be the vanguard of justice.  I will, people will occupy that dangerous space.    But (and here it is) I’d so much rather not have to.  Not because it shouldn't be me, but because it shouldn't be.  Don’t they remember the ideals they taught me: freedom and justice for all?  Why don’t they remember?  Why isn’t it everywhere?  And then you pay attention to our history—why has it never been everywhere? 

I’m so tired.

So easy for me to say.  I am a white woman, middle aged now, with a good education and a salary job.  I understand that them being after any body is them coming after my own body.  I mean, they do

 come after my own body.  But these days, honestly, my body is safe.  I’m ok.  I can be tired after my work week and take the outrage off like a dress to spend my night or my weekend recharging in the safety of my life, my skin, my income, my social status.  I can shake my head, and be sad of it, and put it aside to have a game night with friends or be sure that I get enough sleep at night. 

While other people are being stopped by the police, are sleeping in cages apart from their kids, are in a hospital tonight riddled with bullets.  It’s not fair.  I know.  It haunts me, and it should.  That haunting is my burden to address, just like the old picture my papa once showed me of a picnic at my grandmother’s dad’s farm, with all the black people in the background.  “Who are they?” I asked.  “Oh, they lived there,” he said.  “At his house?” I asked.  “Back behind it," he said.  "They never left, you see."

“They were happy there,” he said.  

That is also my burden to address. 

Cheat code: If you just don’t address it? But you feel reeeeally sad about it tho?  You get to feel like you engaged while actually never doing anything that affected your life, or changed anyone else’s.  This is uncomfortably, factually true.  Even if you would do something if you knew what to do.  Even if your heartbreak is real.  Even if you cry out to do more if you only knew what in God’s name you could do.  Even if you are dying to be really, actively on the right side of this.  Even if you pray to use your body, mind, soul to build the dam that holds back the evil, the inhumanity, the hate.  Even if you thirst for it like eyes for beauty and souls for poetry and crops for rain.

So what do we build?  What do I do with my life, my privilege, my burden?  What is fair, when nothing is fair?  What is the next right step?

Where is my hope?  Well I guess it’s in my black-eyed peas, and my compost pile.  That’s a real but deeply saddening answer. 

Where is your hope?  Will you share it with me?

Where is our hope, for this country built on a dream I believe in?  Because you can’t believe but do nothing.  But what do you do?

I try to, as my mother always said, keep my side of the fence clean.  Do your part. The things that are definitely yours to do—do them.  I love my neighbor. I try to be a person who sees people as people, meets them in dignity and offers them respect.  But that doesn’t feel like activism, not on the scale that is required by our country.  

The situation demands so much more. 

What do we build?  When we are lied to, when we are betrayed by those in power, what do we build?  When the world is boiling, emotionally, spiritually, and physically?  When my little home in my little house is mostly ok but scared, and we are not even the people who need to be really afraid, and we know that?  What do we DO, when we are ready and willing but also constrained by the normal things of everyday life—work schedules, tight budgets, limited emotional capacity, my niece’s birthday party coming up, the cat’s vet appointment?  What do we DO, when we are willing but not always able?

I go to my garden.  They said it was hope.  I am trying to grow it.  I try and make the soil a little bit better, do something productive with what I have.  I love doing productive things.  I want to do something productive SO. HARD.

 

So I harvest my peas while kids still sleep in cages, people are in hospitals riddled with bullets, and a whole huge part of this country acts like everything is roses.  I drove by a billboard last week that said Trump Keeps His Promises, and someone paid for that billboard—is paying for it.  People have decided to hate other people and harm their bodies for it, and I’m not there.  I’m here, and safe, and sad. I can’t be there, El Paso, but I can bear witness. I am very aware that bearing witness is not enough. 

Bearing witness feels like the only tool in my toolbox these days. 

I go to my garden.  I will share my harvest with you.  I will humbly ask you to share fellowship with me. This is not the world we were tasked to build; I will be active in rebuilding it.  I will work.  I am a good worker.  

I will build.  I will try.  I will do what it takes.

I don’t know what to do.