KC neighbors do battle over Trump, Biden in ‘sign war.’ How do they keep it friendly?
In William Slusher’s yard in Waldo, one of the political signs he had printed himself says, “We don’t believe in: Caging innocent children, injecting disinfectant, playing golf during a crisis, grabbing p----, slowing the U.S. mail, separating immigrant families, using federal troops against protesters.” There’s more on the back, but you get the drift.
All across Slusher’s yard, liberal signage is in full bloom, and his home itself is beribboned with a jumbo Joe Biden flag. “This is my therapy,” he says of his garden of anti-Trump messages.
Across the street, Tom Hawkins prefers the simpler, pre-printed signs he gets from his candidate: “God & Country TRUMP,” they say. And “Keep America Great TRUMP.” There are four of these, along with a sprinkling of American flags.
“I don’t have to make a bunch of noise and be hypocritical” like some people, he says pointedly, and Slusher obliges him with a laugh.
If you haven’t been hearing that many polite chuckles from across the ideological street, maybe that’s because we increasingly see people who vote differently as just plain wicked: An academic study last year found that 42% of both Republicans and Democrats said they see those in the other party as “downright evil.”
While others respond to those who disagree with puke emojis and physical threats, these Kansas City neighbors are engaged in a such a civilized “sign war,” as they call it, that Hawkins and his wife bring Slusher and his partner a different kind of muffins every Saturday morning, in a bag that Hawkins decorates in a different seasonal theme each week.
In one of her fabulous homes, Martha Stewart is smiling. But how do these two do it? How can a man who thinks Barack Obama was our best modern president trade jokes and baked goods with someone who thinks he was our worst?
“It’s about respect,” says Hawkins, a 66-year-old former project manager who retired from Burns & McDonnell recently. More and more, we avoid that obligation by self-segregating with the like-minded, where we worship and where we live.
Which is too bad, because in a masked conversation in Slusher’s driveway, I can see that though they’re from different political tribes, facing one another for 18 years has made them loyal to another tribe, too, here on this block.
“I’ll defend him if anybody tries to come into this neighborhood and do him harm,” says Hawkins.
They don’t actually talk politics
One key to the comity, says the liberal neighbor, a 55-year-old architect, is a strong sense of boundaries. As in, they don’t actually talk about politics at all, beyond a little poke here and there.
It wouldn’t get them anywhere to argue, both say, since Hawkins has never seen any reason to doubt President Donald Trump — “I don’t give him any style points, but I do like the results” — and Slusher has never considered supporting him.
Still, “I halfway agree with Tom,” Slusher puts in, since “it’s the style that’s most upsetting to me, too.”
That seems unlikely, given that Slusher also says that his top issues are all the migrant children who’ve been separated from their parents at the border, and the environment, at a time when much of the American West is on fire.
But then, before all sides decided that the world was on fire, for very different reasons, neighbors regularly softened their stances to get along. And even the most heated arguments wouldn’t result in a commonly agreed upon set of facts.
Hawkins, for instance, wasn’t bothered by reports of Trump disparaging our troops because he says those have been “proven completely wrong” by 21 eyewitnesses.
They haven’t been; on the contrary, outlets from Fox News to Foreign Policy have confirmed and expanded on the original reporting in The Atlantic. Didn’t we all hear Trump disrespect John McCain’s service and sacrifice?
“I was not happy with that particular comment,” Hawkins says, but it wasn’t as bad as the media made it out to be. “The media don’t have a sense of humor or understand sarcasm.” He has a lot more to say on that subject, I’m confident.
Neither thinks the end of America is nigh
But more important to Slusher and Hawkins’ friendly relationship than their divergent view of events is that neither man buys his own party’s argument that if the other side wins, this thing called America is over.
If Trump wins again, Slusher reasons, “he may not care what the Republicans think any more,” and may instead “do his own thing.”
Hawkins says our system was perfectly designed to “prevent anything catastrophic. I’m a child of the ‘60s, so I’ve been through this crap before.”
Cities aren’t going to be burned by mobs, Hawkins says, because “enough of us believe in our Second Amendment rights.”
Trump isn’t going to refuse to leave office if he loses, as Slusher sees it. “I think he’ll leave, kicking and screaming.”
These are very different guys on every day of the year. Including Halloween, when Slusher goes all out and Hawkins turns his lights out, “which is his right.”
But despite all of their signage, both see politics as part of life — “only one subject,” as Hawkins says, rather than the subject.
That, too, is how they can joust in a way that draws no blood.
Perhaps because so many Americans are stuck at home still, an awful lot of us are letting our lawns do the talking this year, and our yards have never been yappier, advertising that we think Black Lives Matter, Blue Lives Matter, or as one sign here says, Jesus Christ Matters. I have my first-ever yard poster, too — a little one in my back garden, with a quote from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail”: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
It’s really only a reminder to myself. And maybe that’s what all of the signs that define us are.
This story was originally published September 14, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
