Sign, Sign, Everywhere A Sign: Political Signs Around Town

'Tis that time of year when, no matter where you go, you see signs everywhere promoting candidates vying for elected office.

Everywhere.

For someone who has spent most of my life in this area, one of the things that people have held most sacred was the pristine, rural way of life, and the fact that eastern Long Island is one of the most beautiful places on earth because of its picturesque landscape.

With this in mind, we have legislation and have gone to significant taxpayer expense that protect our natural resources and beauty of it.

Now more than ever, we rely on tourism activity and dollars to bring people here to enjoy what we seem to take for granted everyday.

So, while driving east along Sound Avenue yesterday, I saw scores of election signs big and small pretty much littering the entire landscape along which is normally a beautiful stretch of road.

My first reaction was basically: "UGH!"

For some reason, even local property owners see it fit to choose these months to essentially litter their yards with these signs, some have 6 or 7 at a time.

In fact, I saw one yard with two of the exact same sign merely 10 feet apart from one another.

That means that just in case you didn't see the first sign while driving by their yard at 35 MPH, the second sign you'll see in mere nanoseconds in the corner of your eye will certainly help convince you to vote for that candidate, even though there's no mention of platform, position or sponsorship on that sign.

Really?

Given the general disgust that I share with many for the lack of political leadership these days, constant backbiting and bickering that underscore an outrageous obstruction of progress, the more signs and litter-ature I see of a particular candidate these days, the less I am inclined to support them.

I particularly like the ones that say "Sponsored by Friends of Candidate XYZ" instead of really saying "Sponsoring Friend of Candidate XYZ is actually Corporation ABC". Thanks for the gumball on that one, Supreme Court.

Last year, I got 15 mailers in the matter of 2 weeks from a certain political candidate. Yes, 15.

As in the previous 14 times when I pulled these out of my mailbox, I wasn't paying attention.

Needless to say, I called that campaign and requested to be removed from their spam list, because that's exactly what it is - unsolicited mail. Thankfully, that candidate did not win election, but shamefully, they spent obscene amounts of money on physical spam.

It would be nice to adjust local legislation to curb this practice as many other parts of the country have, such as weekend-only signage that must come up by Monday morning and stay down until Friday.

It would also be nice someday to see a clear platform of what a candidate stands for without articulating "he said, she said" pissing contests and concealing who actually funded that campaign communication - transparency anybody?

Perhaps in the next election season in Neverneverland.

What do you think? Do you also consider this litter-ature or do you advocate these practices?