This is the audio version of the article I posted on October 26th. Background noise will be provided by whatever crap my sons are watching on youtube, as well as my dogs, who might start to bark. Hope you enjoy.
Hate Has No Home Here
Poor hate! If I am to believe all the colorful yard signs decorating the neighborhood, hate is simply not welcome in most of the houses. This makes me wonder: was hate, at one time, welcome? Or perhaps, has hate come knocking again and again recently, making a pest of itself like some dark-side Jehovah's Witness? Maybe these signs are necessary, to keep hate off the property.
"Hey hate! Don't bother - just keep moving!"
I haven't put one of these signs in our yard - I've seen no need for it, as hate has not yet come to the house. But maybe I have cause for concern: if hate feels unwelcome elsewhere, will it come here for lack of other choices? And if it does, will I feel sorry for it and take it in?
Considering that scenario - if hate DID have a home... well perhaps it wouldn't feel the need to go around and bother people so much!
Maybe I can do something to rile up some hate and make it feel more welcome. I suppose a Harris sign in the yard could do it - stir up a big pickup truck with those coal-rolling chrome pipes on the back, big American flags gorilla-taped to the cab, fwap-fwaping in the breeze, Talibama-style. Or, better yet, a Trump sign - that would be sure to get some goat. An irate mob of college professors might bicycle to the lawn and hold a workshop on micro aggressions.
Conversely, I could put up a sign announcing that black lives matter. Then I could maybe get a few dozen white nationalists, who would arrive in scrappy 80's-era Dukes of Hazard type cars - but not shiny like the General Lee, instead really beat up and rusty because they are all too poor and rural and ignorant to know that blacks are real people, just like them!
Or how about a confederate flag?
The professors would return, pelting the house with artisanal cheese and baguettes and back-issues of The New Yorker, and joined by a student coalition that would form a human chain across the driveway, blocking us in until I replace the confederate flag with the insignia of the Palestine Liberation Army, which will confuse people, because they will mistake the angry-looking bird for something vaguely fascistic and Nazi-ish, incurring a march from the local synagogue, at which point I replace that with the Israeli flag, and the anti-war hippies arrive in Subarus with megaphones and very angry faces until I take that down and try out a right-to-life poster, and oh! the angry women will arrive, lower jaws protruding in a hateful expression!
Then maybe something to rattle the Christians... some satan stuff, and maybe I could read a treatise on a woman's right to abort up to 45-weeks!
I'd have to get the trans people involved, but I'd be running out of ideas and materials by that time, so I'd just write "trans is stupid!" on the back of an envelope in Sharpie marker, and stick it into the front lawn with a toothpick. A trans person would come by, walking their dog, but not notice it, and at that point I would have to admit to myself that I had welcomed hate to the best of my ability, and still failed to give it a home, or even make it feel comfortable enough to come in for a cup of tea.
I don't know why people even need to bother with those signs.
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