I know firsthand of the rash of attacks on Romney/Ryan signs across America. A friend in Ohio posted on Facebook that her yard sign was seized from her property – she replaced it with another and applied a layer of invisible disincentive to stealing it – and there are numerous reports of sign thefts throughout the nation. My own yard sign was stolen – replaced by a new sign offered by a kind neighbor with an ample supply – and, amid reports that racist American Islamic leader Louis Farrakhan is calling for post-election violence in the nation if Obama loses, a young man in Wisconsin who called out to thieves expropriating his Romney/Ryan sign was savagely beaten.
None of this is shocking in a deeply divided nation that faces a historic choice in this year’s presidential election: buy snatches of time to try and save capitalism and what’s left of what was once – and is no longer – a free republic or sanction Big Government for total government control.
But somehow today’s news, captured in the photograph by Jack Stephens and included here, of a burning Romney/Ryan sign on a Virginia couple’s front lawn provides a definitive image of the deteriorating state of the union under Barack Obama. No single picture in this long, painful presidential campaign better expresses what is happening to the United States of America under Obama: destruction. It is particularly fitting that the expression of free speech – an ideal the Obama administration abhors (as I wrote here) – on private property – another concept the government that gave us ObamaCare hates – is being burned. Property rights and freedom of speech are crucial only to those who love their own life and happiness on earth. Obama preaches and governs the opposite of selfishness – self-sacrifice – as the highest ideal and self-immolation is a common act for its most consistent practitioners. But make no mistake: those who hold self-abnegation as the ideal will not stop at setting themselves on fire. As we have seen, they will set fire to expressions of views with which they disagree and they will eventually get around to burning the people who express those views. We have seen pictures like this in the past. We know how this story ends. On November 6, we either heed the warning and reject more of the same, which leads to sacrifice, destruction and death, or we begin to break from the past and fight to live in the future.