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Ask Dave: My Neighbor Put Up a Trump Sign. How Should I Respond? Should I Respond At All?

Photo credit: Getty X Mike Kim
Photo credit: Getty X Mike Kim

From Esquire

Every Monday, Esquire's editor-at-large and resident (unlicensed) therapist Dave Holmes answers a question from readers. Ask Dave your own question by emailing him a askdaveholmes@gmail.com. All answers are legally binding.

Dear Dave,

My neighbor across the street just put a giant Trump/Pence flag in their front yard. A week later―the day after the Breonna Taylor grand jury came back—he added a Blue Lives Matter flag to the pole. These people are very kind, perhaps the kindest and most generous people on our suburban block. And yet ... they're Trump supporters? They reject the idea of Black Lives Matter?

I don't know what to do about it. It's like a big middle finger, whether they know it or not. I'd like to put up a Biden sign, or a "Hate Has No Home Here" sign, to at least show the other neighbors, the people who drive by, and the delivery people that we don't share our neighbor's politics. But is that just an escalation? A middle finger to his middle finger? By putting up my own sign, and then seeking affirmation for that sign from strangers on social media, am I adding to the division in this country because it might fray my relationship with my neighbor? Should I instead knock on their door and begin a dialogue?

Am I coward? Am I overthinking this? Please, help!

xoxo Liberal Neighbor

Related video: When are the 2020 presidential debates?

Dear Liberal Neighbor,

Immediately after reading your question, I attempted a little thought experiment, and I’d like for you to try it yourself. Pause for a moment. Clear your mind. Now close your eyes and imagine your neighbor putting this much care, concern and circumspection into his yard flag choices. Picture him with his finger making little circles on the trackpad, cursor orbiting the BUY button, asking himself “Do I? Should I?” Visualize the family dinner where they explore and evaluate the implications of these flags and the messages they send to all who see them.

I’ll give you a minute.

You couldn’t do it, could you? I did all my best imaginatin’ and I couldn’t. There is no picturing to be done there. And it’s not because the guy isn’t capable of care, concern or circumspection. He probably is! He just didn’t apply any of those things here. He thought: “I would like for Donald Trump to be re-elected. What’s the best way to express that? I know: a flag.” That’s it. That was his whole process.

There are two possible reasons why he put those signs up.

The first and most generous is that he simply could not see why a Trump campaign sign and its little brother Blue Lives Matter would be controversial at all. We can assume that your neighbor consumes—in the absolute best case scenario—a good deal of Fox News. I’m confident he may dabble in right-wing talk radio as well. And I don’t know whether you’ve dipped your toe in those waters recently, but if you do, you may be alarmed by what you learn about yourself, first and foremost that you don’t exist at all. Kind, intelligent, caring, careful and patriotic progressives like you (and me) are just not a thing in that ecosystem. If you care about the planet, or reproductive rights, or LGBT equality, or examining and trying to fix the systemic inequalities Black people face, you are not a good person with a different point of view, you’re a simp who hates America, loves when cops get shot, and if you haven’t assassinated a newborn baby yet, boy, you’re waiting for the call.

Fox starts the day by cherry-picking the worst ten seconds of last night’s protest, the president tweets “LAW AND ORDER" and then by 5 p.m. Dana Perino and Greg Gutfield are engaged in a spirited debate: do BLM protesters want to kiss cop-killers on the mouth, or do they want to make your mother do it? This is not the 1992 Rush Limbaugh “feminazi” shit anymore, this is a wholly new and unhealthy symbiosis between a pandering news network and a President who sits in front of it all day long.

If your neighbor swims in these media waters, he’s doing what he has been led to believe is right. But he’s also been led to believe that anyone who takes offense to it is weak, lazy or violent, and probably all three, when you stand as proof that that’s incorrect. And critically, at this moment, he’s being led to believe that Joe Biden is a radical socialist, when any sober analysis of his record will show that on the most progressive day of his fifty-year political career, Joe Biden has maybe been a Tory.

Photo credit: SOPA Images - Getty Images
Photo credit: SOPA Images - Getty Images

My suspicion is that he simply doesn’t see how any rational person could disagree with the messages of his front-yard signs, so he just put them up and hasn’t given it a second thought.

The other possibility is that he knows it’s a middle finger, and he just really likes giving people the middle finger.

Either way, he did not fret over his choice, so neither should you. If your neighbor is living in a world where no good human being can have a valid opposing viewpoint, he should be shaken out of that delusion by a good human being. If he’s trying to trigger the libs, he should be triggered right back. Put up that Biden/Harris sign. Put that “Hate Has No Home Here” sign right next to it. Do it today, and do it proudly.

Now, you’re absolutely right that you could just knock on his door and start a conversation, but here’s the thing about that: Once the signs are up, you’re going to have that conversation anyway. So do it with intention. Hang the signs and invite them over to the yard for a cocktail. (A single cocktail. You don’t want to get mouthy right off the bat.) It may get ugly, but if he’s as kind as you say, and you’re as good a talker as you are a question-writer, it probably won’t. It might, in fact, go a small way toward chipping away at the divide, and something’s got to, because it’s killing us.

The other thing about that is if you only have the conversation, and you don’t do the signs, then you’re leaving your progressive neighbors, passing cars, joggers, cyclists and delivery people without the moral support that they need. A lot of these people stand to lose their rights in a second Trump administration. A lot of these people stand to lose their livelihoods if this guy gets another four years and our federal response to COVID-19 continues to be “Fuck you, I want to go to Chili’s.” There is a lot at stake here, and people need to know they’re not alone. It makes a difference.

I have some recent experience with this. In late May of this year, a package came for my boyfriend Ben. He tore it right open, and it was a great big rainbow flag. “Pride Month,” he enthused, “Let’s hang it for June!” Now, I have never been a rainbow flag guy. I’ve never had a bumper sticker, never worn a pin, never got the limited-edition Pride Nikes. I’d love to say it’s not internalized homophobia, that I’m just a private type of person, but I have no qualms about wearing t-shirts that tell you which bands I like, so it’s totally internalized homophobia. But Ben was really excited, so we hung it. (Also, we hadn’t been to a restaurant or a bar in around nine weeks by this point, so we’d saved somewhere in the area of $48,000. Can’t blame the guy for wanting to spend a little money.)

At the beginning of the pandemic, we'd started a tradition of sitting on our front lawn in the evenings, having a drink, waving to our neighbors as they pass. We live on a street with a lot of foot traffic, a lot of young couples with kids on bikes, a lot of Orthodox families hoofing it to temple, a lot of people walking their dogs. It’s been a good way for us to get to know our neighbors, and for Pride Month, that flag was a good way for them to get to know us: If there were any doubt that the two middle-aged men holding martini glasses and listening to the new Haim record on a Beats Pill with their Wheaten Terrier were a gay couple, the flag erased that. We’re here, we’re queer, we’re kind of still getting used to it.

A couple of weeks into June, something great happened. A young woman who had recently moved into a guest unit down the block jogged by, as she had most nights, and as we had most nights, we waved at each other. But that evening she stopped, she hit pause on her iPhone, she took a single AirPod out, and said, “Hi.” She took a long moment to say what she was going to say next. We watched her search for the words, and what she settled on— timidly, carefully—was: “I ... like your flag.”

The personal declarations or internal monologues that have happened or are in process for her right now are not ours to know, but whatever they are, she knows she’s supported. She knows she has a couple of allies down the street.

I like that for her. I wish I’d had it.

Your neighbors deserve it. Hang those signs.

For what it’s worth, it’s nearly October, and ours is still up.

Ask Dave a question at askdaveholmes@gmail.com.

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