By Matthew Tomlinson

I nearly crashed my car into a tree from laughing at a sign posted on 737 North in Greenwich Township. The sign reads, “IF YOUR VOTING FOR SOCIALISM, GET OUT MY COUNTRY!” and has a picture of President Obama’s face crossed out on it.

First of all, saying “GET OUT OF MY COUNTRY!” is absurd, because the owner of the sign doesn’t own this country. We all have the right to hold our own political beliefs; that’s kind of the point of a democracy.

Second, they spelled “your” instead of “you’re.” It looks silly and certainly doesn’t do much for their argument. It almost seems like a satire of uneducated right-wing ideologues.

But, I get what they are trying to say. They posted the sign up to tell the liberal college folk who voted for Obama to get out the country. A popular belief amongst private land owners around the university seems to be that Obama is going to make them pay more for social welfare programs for people who don’t deserve it, because they do not work and do not have huge plots of land to plow with their huge tractors.

The fact that the owner put this sign on the side of the road, where college kids will be driving, shows that they are just trying to make people mad. They obviously know that the sign has not made anyone actually leave the country. It’s just meant to cause liberals to get a little upset and make conservatives beat their chests while hooting and hollering out of their truck windows as they drive by it on their daily commute to work.

I went to the KU campus to get the students’ opinions. Brittany Howard said she “just looked at the sign and laughed.” Other students gave similar reactions. It’s clear that the student body does not take the message seriously.

The sign doesn’t reflect badly on KU; it’s just a reminder that some people have some extreme political opinions that they choose to be vocal about.

All in all, the poster of the sign is entitled to their opinion and they can put whatever they want on their own property, but posting the sign publicly means we also have the right to be critical of their silly rhetoric and grammatical errors.