When Nicole Bailey saw the political yard sign her husband carried into their house Sunday, she cried. “This really upset me,” she says. The sign, which she put in their yard in support of Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, had been vandalized overnight. It was spray painted black. Those who saw it were left to wonder if it was a political move or a racial statement against the woman who, if she wins, would become the first ever black woman governor in the nation.
Bailey thinks it’s the latter.
“I am appalled at the racist hate someone must have to think this is okay,” she tells Now Habersham. She says, as a school teacher, she usually tries not to say much about politics but seeing that painted yard sign changed that.
“I am so sad that this is the state of our political system today,” Bailey says. To her, the sign is a symptom of “what obviously shows a complete breakdown of respect in our small town.”
A registered Republican, Bailey says she’s never before voted for a Democrat. She decided to support Abrams because of her views on education. Bailey knows not everyone shares her opinion and not everyone voices their political views through vandalism and vulgarity. Her across the street neighbor has a Kemp sign in her yard. “We often say hello or she talks about her grandkids,” Bailey says. “We are friendly and civil, the way humans who even might think differently should be.”
That same neighbor was appalled by what the sign vandal did and hugged Bailey after it happened.
As upset as she was, like a true teacher, Nicole Bailey found a way to turn the vandalized yard sign into a lesson. “If we only take notice of the negative then we will never survive,” she says. “I must find the positive, always.”
And she did.
Within hours of removing the yard sign from her yard, Bailey repainted it and put it back. It still shows her support for her chosen candidate but it also bears a different, deeper, more meaningful message: On one side it now reads ‘Love Trumps Hate’.
“I decided to repaint the sign because I didn’t think it was fair that hate won,” Bailey says.
On this occasion, in the midst of a bitterly divisive election, in our small corner of the world, it’s nice to be able to say it did not.
