Razor Blades at Close Range

For a number of years after the 2008 presidential election, I'd pass a house in Norwich, near the golf course on the New London Turnpike with a large John McCain lawn sign. It went up in the heat of that campaign for the heart and soul and perhaps spleen of America and was there for what felt like forever afterward; I'm not sure it didn't just fall down. 

I try, though sometimes fail, to update the bumper stickers on my car's back window to reflect my at-the-moment white-hot personal and political passions. I still refer to them as bumper stickers even though they're now on the car's window because I'm a fossil who remembers when cars had metal bumpers and you put sticky stuff with persnickety quips printed on them on the bumpers, but who does that any more? Someone who doesn't want to ever succeed in removing the sticker in its entirety at some later date, I guess. 

My distaste for The Former Guy, a/k/a #Pantload 45, and/or the Orange Shitstain on the Oval Office, has shifted in the course of the last half a decade or so. I went from mocking him as a less than credible candidate to ridiculing him while he held the office to, just last month (or the month before, I've lost track) moving on with the times, even if he can't, and going with 'Trump in Prison,' because he should be and nothing on your back window or porch flag will convince me otherwise. 

I have removed more than a few stickers from the window with a razor scraper and a not inconsiderable amount of reluctance. We are what we eat and what we wear and what we drive, I have come to believe we make changes in any of those areas only under some form of duress. 

So take a deep breath and consider this: Unless the bumper sticker is holding the Volvo bio-diesel station wagon together as your Birkenstock-shod gas pedal foot makes sure you never break the speed limit, get that outdated election year artifact off the car. It's like having a Vote McKinley campaign button on your straw boater as you dance the black bottom. That 70's Show was the nineteen seventies, after all, and they had the decency to stop once they were no longer funny (eventually).

Didn't you get the memo on this stuff? More on point, didn't you read it? Do we actually need Department of Transportation and Highway Safety rules banning trite and no longer necessary or relevant adhesive messages? Does that mean if your child has children of her/his own, it's time for the "My Child Is an Honor Student at Ridgemont Elementary School" to come off the car? What do you think? 

And no, State of Washington drivers, you can't leave the "Fifty Four Forty or Fight" stickers on your back windows. But nice try.
-bill kenny