A poster for an event that happened in June that’s still up in November is no longer speech. It is at this point litter. There’s a Scoop Your Poop sign down the street from me over which someone had posted an ad for a parking space. That was litter. A Chinese food restaurant put a stack of menus on the call box for my building. The wind blew them into the hedges. This was litter. And yes, around the corner from my apartment there’s a light-post with a similar sign to the one PoP posted. It was tacked up with some sort of adhesive, and while it’s no longer legible, it was when I moved to the neighborhood over a year ago. At that point it was for an event that had passed by five months earlier. So now, a year and a half after the event, what was once speech is now just trash. Is this really a distinction so hard to grasp?

While recognizing there is a good and reasonable difference between commercial and political speech, it’s incumbent on a good citizen not to trash his country when making a point. It makes me crazy to see discarded posters and signs on the ground from tea bagger rallies and anti-war rallies alike. Just because someone has a message doesn’t give them carte blanche to trash a neighborhood.

As for election signs, are they even legal to post in public rights of way? I don’t understand why a city so desperate for revenue doesn’t institute a strict sign removal policy wherein campaigns, organizations, and individuals are charged man hours for the removal of past dated signs. How many Orange for Mayor signs were up around light posts months after he lost a primary he was never even in? There isn’t a lot of incentive for a losing campaign to remove their signs. (Anyone drive through NOVA lately? I’m looking at you, Creigh Deeds.) But if a month and a day after the election or event, campaigns were billed for the removal of every sign left up, I can tell you as someone who is familiar with campaign debt, that problem would go away.