Well, I had the right to free speech....but somebody swiped it.

Considering that I am a pretty ardent pacifist, I had what I thought was fairly mild anti-war bumper sticker on the back of my car. Other people disagreed, and thought that it was so radical that I was "looking for trouble", especially here in the County, which is a pretty darn conservative place. I even heard, over and over, how aweful it was for a businesswoman like me to have such a bumper sticker: that I was surely turning away business. This was an idea that I found sort of funny, since these comments came from people who had known me a long time. I'd hope anybody who knew me for more than 5 minutes would know that it would take a LOT more than the potential for loss of income to get me to back off of my principles. After all, isn't the right to free speech an important part of American life? And if you can't use it, then why bother to have it?

You can decide if you thought the bumper sticker was radical or not. This is what it said:

The word "Mission" had a red line through it. Above that word was written "Nothing" and on the same line as "Mission" it said "Accomplished". So the message was "Nothing Accomplished". And below that it said, "Defeat Bush in '04". This pretty much summed up how I felt: that we'd sent good, honorable people into harm's way for no good reason and that, as a result, I was going to vote for anybody but Bush come fall.

Then somebody ripped it off. I drove down to Ellicott City to meet The Hub for supper. In the parking lot of Boston Market he said, "What happened?"

"To what?"

He pointed at the bumper. The sticker was gone, and there were some trailing hand prints in the little bit of dust on the car. "That's ignorant" he said, hotly.

"You didn't do it?" ( The Hub is a noted Hawk. He was very uncomfortable with the bumper sticker, but acknowleged that it was my car and I had a right to put whatever I wanted on there. "Guess we just shouldn't drive it to Mom and Dad's, though" he muttered)

"Oh, boy, I just made myself a suspect, didn't I?"

"No. You're a man of honor. If you say you didn't do it, you didn't do it."

I do have a suspect, but I'm not going to say anything else. After all, I could be wrong, and I WOULD be accusing the person of stealing something, which is no light matter among honorable people.

I suppose I should be grateful that they just felt moved to swipe the bumper sticker. If it was just some random person in the parking lot of the market, say, they're clearly not into civil discourse, so I'm luckey they didn't flatten my tires or something. And, really, if somebody did steal it because it bothered them, then it did its job because the person had to think about it and then decide they wanted to steal it. And now they have to deal with the fact that they stole it. They probably don't care - they probably don't even think they did anything wrong. But they did.

Oh, well, it's gone now. That's life. I really wish the person had talked to me about how they felt. Who knows, perhaps they had some point, some bit of information that I am unaware of on the subject, some take on the situation that would have changed my mind. But as it was, I was the free speaker excercising my constitutional rights through a bumper sticker....and my "opposition" is the kind of person who, disagreeing with me, just went ahead and ripped it off.

Whoever did it ain't winnin' my heart or mind that way!