A story told to me in a bar (the best place for stories to be told):
Some friends and I went to Guadalajara Mexico for a week. I wanted to bring this great shirt I made myself that said "Fuck Bush" in big red letters. It looked like crap and was obviously homemade, and my friends were kind of embarrassed by it and tried to talk me out of bringing it, but I packed it anyhow.
The first few days we were down there were awful. There were interesting-looking people from all over the world staying in the same hostel as us, but nobody wanted to talk to us and we were left alone, watching everyone else have fun. So the third day, I just said ‘fuck it’ and wore my shirt. The caretaker of the hostel saw it and wasn’t quite clear on what it meant, so he asked me. I explained that it meant that I didn’t agree with Bush’s politics, that I thought his war in Iraq was a dumb-ass war. "Oh, dumb-ass war!" he says, and starts knocking on doors and telling people there is American in the hostel who said Iraq is a dumb-ass war.
People just opened up to us after that. We had a great time. Everyone wanted to be around us and my "Fuck Bush" shirt. People were talking pictures with me in the shirt, asking us to go around the city with them, telling us about all the best stuff to do and see, taking us to dinner and out drinking and dancing every night. We stayed 7 nights, but only paid for the first 2; the hostel caretaker wouldn’t take our money anymore. We made great friends from all over the world and had a great vacation, and it’s all due to my crappy home-made "Fuck Bush" shirt my friends didn’t want me to wear.
I gotta give it to the storyteller, she had the courage of her convictions. I had a bumper sticker made some 3 years ago that I still haven’t had the gumption to stick on my truck. It says "Fuck Bush" coincidentally also in big red letters, and cites Cohen v. CA, the Supreme Court case that found it was political speech protected by the First Amendment to wear a jacket emblazoned with "Fuck the Draft" in a public place.
‘Right’ and ‘smart’ are frequently mutually exclusive domains, however. Even with Bush’s approval in the toilet now, I still worry that my truck would be vandalized if it wore that sticker. My wife tells me she wouldn’t be seen in public in a vehicle that said something so rude and obnoxious – and to be honest, I’m not sure I do either. So, though I’m sure that I would meet with as much approval as the protagonist in this little story, I still am not putting that sticker on my truck. I can’t make up my mind if that’s character, or just cowardice. What do you think?
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Pardon my “Going Off Topic” but what the hell is this crap coming out of the mouth of Barak Hussein Obama that ” If America votes for me as President it will show it has healed its racial wounds!”
I take offense to this half black half white half Christian half Muslim and anti military cocaine snorting,pot smoking chain smoker who thinks he is the reincarnation of Abraham Lincoln. I realize the name similarity of Abraham and Hussein but that about where it stops!
In my Family I have two very fine colored (Black) cousins with children, one very fine Mexican cousin with children, along with white ancestry of every background. The United States has in its State Department a Black Woman Secretary of State that I believe Obama is color blind too; a Attorney General who is from Mexican ancestry and countless active members of the Government. Washington D.CX. itself is 90% Black and you are advised by law enforcement for as long as I can remember in Washington D.C. to stay off the streets after dark because of uncontrolled crime that exceeds the number of soldiers killed in Iraq every day of the week for decades!
Barak Obama may (qoute me now) “Go To Hell!”
During the Iran hostage crisis that ran from November 4, 1979, through January 20, 1981, everyone had shirts with Mickey Mouse flipping “the finger” and underneath the saying “Hey Iran.” In those days I rode a Harley and a biker friend of mine and I didn’t think that message was strong enough so we had the words
F**k
Iran
in huge letters on the front (without the asterisks of course). While the people around us agreed with our message and loved the shirts, we were consistently asked to go “someplace else” whenever we went anywhere but bars.
We were drunk a lot but that’s another story.
You may find the same happens nowadays in the US. While “people” say they love it, the business you find yourself parked around may not………..
As I’m a bit older now, I’m tending to agree with Francine, so you have a grand total of 4c.
Having lived through The Viet Nam era in direct contact with LBJ and Marvin Watson ,and seeing the riots and killings that happened needlessly on colleges and in the streets of Chicago all I can say is to those who died because of social unrest that caused Law Enforcement to react in ways that could have been averted, because LBJ had already decided NOT to run for re-election as Bush had decided long ago NOT to have anyone run for election from his administration, did NOT die in vain;or did they?
Man-Law is what got us into this war.
IT IS A TRUCK… you are supposed to have obnoxious stickers on it!!!!
It is a Man-Law
Unless you have a lot of rude stickers on your truck I don’t see how failing to put this one is cowardice (or character).
If you do have many similarly rude stickers but won’t display the Bush sticker then that’s another matter …
Good judgment!
It’s not necessary to be in people’s faces. There are many people for whom some language is just so offensive they will totally miss the message. There are lots of ways to say what you want to in a way that more people will be able to hear the message.
Just my 2 cents!