Nicole Brodeur / Times staff columnist
Staking hopes on civility

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But the former president is a gentlemanly weapon in the no-quarter-asked, none-given duel for the White House.

Here in Seattle, we've wielded paint guns, knives, cars, rocks and even one of those ball-tossing wands used to play fetch with dogs. Really.

Earlier this month, a woman and three men were spotted yanking out and kicking over Republican campaign signs from the front of the Talaris conference center in Laurelhurst.

According to police, political signs posted on the property had been repeatedly vandalized, so two employees were keeping an eye out. Late one evening, they spotted the group and told them they were on private property.

The woman yelled obscenities and said she was a longtime neighborhood resident, so was within her rights.

When one of the Talaris employees took a photo of her, police said, she struck him three times on the head with the ball tosser. Words and slurs were traded, and the woman poked one of the Talaris employees several times in the chest with her finger. Police are investigating it as an assault.

Also in Laurelhurst, KIRO-TV reported that a driver had gunned onto a parking strip to take out a Kerry-Edwards sign.

I've heard of a house in West Seattle where the owner put up a huge Bush-Cheney sign — and barbed wire to protect it.

And then there is Marilyn Sprague of Burien, who has repaired and replaced the Bush-Cheney signs on her front fence three times, had her house and minivan fired upon by a paint gun in the middle of the night, and been flipped off because of the Republican bumper stickers on her car.

"It's really hard," she said. "We have kids."
 
And we're teaching them valuable lessons, aren't we, with all this live-and-let-live? Computers have been stolen from state Republican campaign offices. From Mukilteo to Bellevue, no sign is safe.

This election has us behaving like high-school hooligans scheming to keep the dork off the student council.

Desperate times call for desperate measures — and with more than 1,100 soldiers dead in Iraq, the stock market slipping and all of us on edge, I think we can agree that these are some very long days.

But what sort of days will we share after next week, when the results are in and the signs come down? Will we be able to stand together in the same yards where we now stake our divisive hopes?

The first job for the last man standing on Nov. 2 won't be to end the war or boost the economy — but to unify a country fed a steady diet of negativity, accusations and venom. And to give us a little lesson in civics and civility — if he himself remembers.

"It's sad," Sprague told me. "If you can't put a sign up on your own yard and feel safe in your own country, then do we really have freedom of speech?"

Nicole Brodeur's column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. Reach her at 206-464-2334 or nbrodeur@seattletimes.com.

Her weapon is behind the curtain.