“Our signs reveal us” — Eudora Welty

Have a sign you want to share? Send it to blankenhorn@civic-life.org.

“Our signs reveal us” — Eudora Welty

Have a sign you want to share? Send it to blankenhorn@civic-life.org.

“Our signs reveal us” — Eudora Welty

Have a sign you want to share? Send it to davidblankenhorn@civic-life.org.

Photo from Waltraud Fink.

“Our signs reveal us” — Eudora Welty

Have a sign you want to share? Send it to davidblankenhorn@civic-life.org. Thanks!

“Our signs reveal us” — Eudora Welty

Have a sign you’d like to share? Please send it to blankenhorn@civic-life.org.

Here’s my original article:

Coming soon: The Free Pie podcast!

Photo by David Blankenhorn

“Our signs reveal us” — Eudora Welty

Here is last week’s sign.

Here’s the campaign’s kick-off article, “Signs of Civic Life”

Have a sign you’d like to share? Please send it to Blankenhorn@civic-life.org.

Free Pie is the media initiative of Civic Life.

Each Wednesday, subscribers receive a podcast, an essay, or a sign of civic life.

Photo by David Blankenhorn

Have a sign you’d like to share? Please send it to Blankenhorn@civic-life.org.

I love American signs and rise to praise them. I love the fact that they’re everywhere, even where they don’t belong. I love their astonishing variety, including their often pig-stomping vulgarity. I love the clamor and disorder of them. I love their incessant, usually unguided, syncretism. Most of all, I love the fact—well, at least it’s my firm conviction—that looking at our signs is looking at us.

In his famous essay “The Power of the Powerless,” Václav Havel invites us to consider the meaning of a shopkeeper in 1970s Communist-run Czechoslovakia putting up a sign in his store window saying, “Workers of the world, unite!” Havel asks: “What is he [the shopkeeper] trying to communicate to the world?” Does his sign reflect “any personal desire to acquaint the public with the ideal it expresses?” Havel doubts that it does. Instead, Havel concludes, the sign “contains a subliminal but very definite message” to his neighbors and his rulers:

I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore have the right to be left in peace.

In many unfree societies, signs put up by individuals serve this purpose, just as signs put up by the state serve the complementary purposes of glorifying rulers and reinforcing official ideology.

Not so much in the United States; indeed, more the opposite. American signs sing out eccentricity more than conformity, independence rather than obedience, and the right to engage all comers much more than the right to be left in peace. The subliminal message of American signs is not, “I know what I must do”; it’s rather, “Here’s what I have to say!”

America’s signs don’t aim to placate our rulers or even our garden-variety local politicians, but rather to entice and persuade and provoke and plead with each other. The main flow of the communication is not vertical, but horizontal. That’s why American signs are so insistent and also why they’re everywhere. Our signs are us, as a form of visual-speak that never closes up for the night or goes on holiday. Our national experience strongly suggests that putting up an astonishing landscape of signs—small and large, elegant and garish, addressing everything from suntan lotion to salvation—is what people do if they are free to do it.

This reality has deeply shaped how America looks and feels, for both better and worse. For starters, consider what most of the world views as our crass commercialism. When I was a child, driving down long stretches of Mississippi and Alabama highways with my parents and brother, I remember the endless parade of “Stuckey’s” billboards: Stuckey’s 100 miles! Stuckey’s 90 miles! Stuckey’s 80 miles! … and so on down the highway, almost trance-inducing, until we finally reached, well, Stuckey’s. I’ve never much cared for what Stuckey’s sold (“pecans candies gifts”) but to this day I’ll pull into a Stuckey’s any time, in memory of those signs, and just buy something else. Of course, as I look back, those yellow billboards also seem like a kind of unfolding roadside monstrosity—too big, too repetitive, maybe also too silly and wasteful.

But Americans tend to strive mightily for commercial success, so we accept and sometimes even admire brash, over-the-top salesmanship. We put up signs about everything, but by far the largest share concern buying and selling—and we make few if any apologies for it. Many generations of foreign visitors, especially those from more settled and civilized societies, don’t see it that way. They have noted and often criticized this part of who we are, but there it is. Seventy miles!

Another identity-revealing aspect of American signage is its aesthetic. Basically, there is none. Or perhaps more accurately, there is every aesthetic in our signage. Many of our signs are modern, polished, and beautifully crafted. Yet many—I’d guess most—are not in that tradition, which for me is terrific. I adore American signs that are distressed, careworn, and nearly played out. I’m also a sucker for homemade, jerry-rigged, and inelegant signs, including those with awkward or unusual wording. One of my favorites, for example, posted on the door of a wonderful Japanese eatery, says “No Outside Foods Allowed In.”

Tom Wolfe once described Las Vegas, Nevada, as the only city in the world where buildings reflect the tastes of average citizens instead of sophisticated elites. The same is true regarding signage—but it’s true almost everywhere in America, not just in Las Vegas. As a result, American signs don’t shape us as much as they reveal and reflect us, especially at ground level and in our various aspects, warts and all. That’s why chastising our American signs for their ordinariness and crassness—looking down on them from the heaven of good taste—is a bit like chastising waiters for the food we ordered.

The same is true with respect to American signs about religion and worldview. See one you don’t agree with? Walk a little further down the street. As a child in Mississippi, in those years a state in which prohibitionist belief was as strong as bootlegging was a booming business, I grew up with signs on cars and elsewhere saying, “For the sake of my family, I’ll vote dry.” A while back I saw a sign in front of a fast-food restaurant near Clinton, Mississippi, saying, “Bring in Last Sunday’s Church Bulletin for a 10 Percent Discount.” These signs don’t reflect my own way of making sense of the world. But I respect them, both on their own terms and as ways of understanding some of my fellow citizens.

And what about density? Is any nation on earth more densely signed that the United States? I doubt it. We paste signs on subway turnstiles. We put signs on our car bumpers and windows. We insinuate signs into airport baggage claim carousels, so we can watch them roll by along with our bags. We look up to the sky to notice airplane banners and blimps displaying signs. We put signs in our elevators and in our yards. Via teletron, they now dominate our sports stadiums. We festoon our highways with them, and often our streets and roads as well.

Myriad churches, gas stations, and one-off commercial roadside establishments have those rectangular displays—the ones with the plain black letters stuck on a white background—that change about weekly when weather permits, wanting to sell us not so much good stuff as good counsel: a verse from the Bible, a holy pun or perhaps a stern religious waring (“Christ or Chaos?”), a proverb (“Those Who Think They Can’t Are Usually Right”), or just a kind thought. It’s as though the folks who make up these signs want to talk to you personally but can’t, so the sign is their way of getting a message in edgewise as you go rolling through town.

When it pleases us, we promiscuously stack signs on top of each other and squish them together, as if any sign-free bit of space was at least in principle a wasted space. In America, it seems that anyone who owns or controls anything can put signs on it, and usually does. We like to speak out and be heard; quite often, it seems, we like to make a ruckus.

What unites us as Americans? Especially in this highly polarized era, in which our main feelings toward one another often seem to be anger and mistrust, what might we recognize as something we have in common? As modest and frail as this thought may seem—and I admit it’s both—I want to suggest that we Americans have together made millions of signs telling us that we’re a distinctive people.

The fundamental American idea is freedom. The fundamental way Americans aspire to live together, established at the founding and stated in our motto, is E pluribus unum—from many, one. But to comprehend this way of life you don’t have to read the history books or memorize the sacred civic phrases. You just have to look around. Every day you’ll see millions of us, in great variety and discord, brashly singing out to one another in our signs, as free American citizens.

An earlier version of this essay appeared in The American Interest.

We’re starting a collection. Do you have a photo of a sign you’d like to share? Email it to blankenhorn@civic-life.org. If possible (but this is not required) include the location (city and state) of the sign; the year the photo was taken; and any comments you want to make about why you like this sign, especially in the context of our civic life.

I rise to offer two cheers for Trump Accounts. These tax-advantaged savings accounts for children, many of which are kick-started with a $1000 donation from the federal government, represent the most important innovation in U.S. social policy in the past three decades. Let’s discuss why.

One main way that social policy helps people is through income support. We see that some Americans don’t have enough income, so we create policies to give them more. Fair enough. It’s an idea that anchors much current social policy.

But what if that idea is often inadequate? What if, for many and possibly most Americans, a better focus for social policy is not on income, but on assets? Not on consuming now, but on saving, owning and stewarding over time? A way of helping people in which those in need are not passive recipients, but active participants in helping themselves while strengthening society?

Much of America was built on this idea. In the 1860s, the Homestead Act offered willing Americans 160 acres of western land on the condition that they live on these homesteads and cultivate them. About 1.6 million people claimed these gifts on which they promised to build.

Here the word “stake” is revealing. When homesteaders “staked a claim,” they were not only literally driving stakes into the ground to mark off their 160 acres, they were staking claims in America itself. They received pieces of the country to own, to make bountiful, to build a dream on.

In 1790, Benjamin Franklin, arguably our greatest American, created a revolving loan program in which young artisans of good character could borrow money at low interest to establish themselves in a trade, on the condition that the repaid loans would in turn be used to help more young artisans. This was more than income support. It was seed money coupled with responsibility intended to perpetuate itself across generations.

This tradition of creating institutions and making seed gifts to help people build assets over time inspired Michael Sherraden, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, to write the book Assets and the Poor in 1991 and then spend a career creating and testing what he called Child Development Accounts, a key model for today’s Trump Accounts.

It similarly inspired Brad Gerstner, an investor and entrepreneur, to found the non-profit organization “Invest America” in 2023 to advocate for what became Trump Accounts. It inspired New Jersey Democratic Senator Cory Booker several years ago to propose “Baby Bonds,” similar to Trump Accounts, and it inspired Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz to become the lead Congressional sponsor of Trump Accounts.

Some specifics. All American children under age 18 are eligible for Trump Accounts, which can be opened on their behalf by a parent or other authorized adult. Anyone, from the children themselves to parents and family and members to third-party individuals and organizations, can contribute to the accounts. In addition, all children born between January 1, 2025 and December 31, 2028 -- the period of President Trump’s current term office -- receive from the U.S. government a one-time, $1,000 gift to kick-start the accounts.

The money in these savings accounts is invested in diversified U.S. stocks, which is another way of saying, invested in the U.S. economy. When the savers reach age 18, they can (but are not required to) start using the money, primarily for their education, to purchase a home, or to start a small business.

Michael Sherraden and other scholars believe, and have data to show, that assets -- the things we own and control -- change us. They influence our aspirations. They change how we plan, interact with others and with institutions, and think about the future. They shape our hopes.

Supporters of assets-based social policy -- count me as one -- tend to emphasize the economic benefits to individuals. But we miss much of the story if we overlook the civic benefits. Building wealth over time sparked by societal support does more than offer people a stake in our economy. It offers them a meaningful reason based in personal experience to believe in the country and care about their role as citizens. Financial assets for individuals thus also become civic assets for society.

Trump accounts are no panacea. There are other and (in some contexts likely better) ways for families to save for the future. There’s also the problem of enrollment. To date, fewer than 10 percent of all U.S. children for whom Trump Accounts are available have actually had one opened, and only about one in four children eligible for $1,000 seed gifts have actually claimed one. Those numbers are likely to grow, since the program is still new, but it’s fair to worry that only a minority of children will benefit and that those who do will come from higher-income families.

Which is why, if I ran the zoo, we’d enroll every child at birth with a modest seed gift and use that institutional infrastructure to build out the program. I’d also involve civil society organizations in sponsoring and promoting the accounts, in order to inject grassroots energy and keep the initiative as close to the ground as possible. And I wouldn’t call them Trump Accounts, or make only those children born during the Trump presidency eligible for the $1,000 seed gift, lest we promote the misleading idea that assets-based social policy is inherently politically partisan.

These are genuine challenges. But as a nation we can and should dedicate ourselves to the unfished but vital work of offering every child a stake in America.

A slightly adapted version of this essay appeared in the Deseret News on July 27, 2026.

All people are created equal. We have unalienable rights. Just government is based on the consent of the governed.

Pretty good, huh?

These three ideas, declared by the founders 250 years ago today, changed our lives and the world for the better. It’s why we celebrate this day and why (if we do) we love our country.

But a specter is haunting American patriotism -- the specter of political polarization. Rather than celebrating our love of country in a way that draws us together, we have sadly devised two patriotisms -- one for each half of the country, with each patriotism repugnant to the other and with no shared foundations.

Revering our past

One of these patriotisms mainly looks back in gratitude. To comprehend it, consider these words from “America the Beautiful,” one of our most beloved national anthems, by Katharine Lee Bates:

O beautiful for heroes proved
In liberating strife,
Who more than self their country loved,
And mercy more than life!

In this patriotism, I love America for what she has been and stood for. I revere what the founders accomplished and what so many have fought and died for. My love draws strength from our lived experiences together and a shared past -- what Lincoln called our “mystic chords of memory” -- and from the ways in which America from the beginning has been a force for good and a beacon of freedom in the world.

Summoning our future

The other patriotism mainly looks forward in determination. To comprehend it, consider these words from “Let America Be America Again,” by the great African-American poet Langston Hughes:

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!

In this patriotism, I love America for what she might become. I believe, despite some evidence that I shouldn’t, in America’s possibility. Although America as I see her has never lived up to her principles -- as Frederick Douglass asked in 1852, “What to the slave in the Fourth of July?” -- my pledge to America is that one day she will. I believe with a patriot’s fervor in the future realization of what can now only dimly be seen.

Patriotism for all of us

The great temptation today, a danger on this Fourth of July, is to view these two sides of American patriotism as hostile to one another. Such a view is deeply misguided.

Why? Because each side, when viewed as alien from the other, is a cramped, distorted patriotism. And each side can rightly accuse the other of misunderstanding the land we love.

Surely we can do better than this.

Can’t we, in civic love, look forward, as many progressives do, and back, as many conservatives do?

Can’t we revere our achievements and recognize where we’ve fallen short?

Can’t we honor the profound work of America and face up to what Lincoln -- who said that he “never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence” -- called at Gettysburg America’s “unfinished work”?

We can. And surely this unification is the truest and most-needed form of American love of country.

The two chief qualities of American patriotism are thankfulness and aspiration, and they stand best when they stand together.

Happy Fourth of July!

A slightly adapted version of this essay appears in today’s Deseret News.

A republic depends decisively on the norm of public truth telling. Without it, there is no foundation for mutual trust or for the responsible negotiations that make our democratic way of life possible. For this reason, public lying is arguably the worst possible offence against a society founded on the principle of self-government.

Which brings us to the story of a photograph.

On January 22 in Minneapolis, federal agents arrested Nikema Levy Armstrong, a local African-American civil rights leader. She was arrested for her role earlier that day in a protest against the presence and conduct of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deportation officers in her city.

That same day, the White House posted and circulated a digitally manipulated photograph of her, done in order to make her look weak, fearful, and uncomposed. (The actual, unfalsified photo conveys the opposite qualities in her appearance.) Later, White House spokesperson Kaelan Dorr defended the use of the doctored photo and promised more to come, calling the falsified Armstrong photo a “meme” and stating plainly: “The memes will continue.”

A crucial line just got crossed.

First, this occurrence appears (no pun intended) to be the first time in our nation’s history that a president or a president’s administration has deliberately altered photographic evidence to demean an American citizen for political purposes.

The Administration’s defenders can reply that altering photographs is nothing new, and they are right. Today millions of us use Photoshop to make our pictures more appealing, and each time we do, we alter an original photograph. Many people today also create so-called memes in which photos are altered in order to appear funny or communicate sarcasm.

But the falsification of Nikema Levy Armstrong’s facial image on the day she was arrested was not done by ordinary citizens to make her look more attractive or tell a funny joke. It was done by the highest officials in the land to deceive the public about a possible crime and inflict intentional harm on an American citizen. This has not happened before, and we can thank Heaven for it.

We also learn from this episode that arguably the worst form of public lying is corrupting our visual understanding -- our capacity as citizens to make intelligent use of our own eyes.

Why? Because much scientific evidence suggests that, for humans, seeing is prior to interpretation. Our initial access to the world comes primarily through our eyes. That’s why we say that “seeing is believing” and why saying “I saw it with my own eyes” is more convincing than, for example, “I heard it with my own ears.” Among humans, vision dominates cognition. First and mainly we see it, then we try to make sense of it.

Authoritarian political leaders have long understood and acted on this fact. In the former Soviet Union, Communist rulers regularly doctored official photographs, including the removal of people’s images entirely, because they knew erasing adversaries visually is longer-lasting and runs deeper than simply disparaging them with words. Today, the similarly authoritarian Russian government regularly deploys manipulated photos and videos as part of information warfare campaigns in the Baltic states, Ukraine, and elsewhere.

Hannah Arendt, the great student of totalitarianism, tells us that the ultimate aim of the totalitarian system is not to convince you that its lies are true, or even to force you to treat them as true when you know that they are not. The ultimate goal is to disorient you so thoroughly that you no longer feel able rationally to distinguish fact from fiction.

What’s the best strategy for achieving this state of affairs? It’s to disable me visually -- to put me in a world where I can no longer trust my own eyes. Am I looking at the face of Nekima Levy Armstrong? Maybe, maybe not. I have no way of knowing. I can no longer see my way.

In any society, this form of assault is terrible. In a republic, it’s potentially lethal. Public truth-telling, a necessity for self-governing people, effectively loses its meaning when citizens can no longer reliably judge what is true and what is false.

This is how free societies become unfree.

That’s why, even in today’s noise and haste, when news flies by so quickly that we feel unable to give anything the attention it deserves, all of us ought to take a moment, for the sake of our republic, to look carefully at the actual face of Nekima Levy Armstrong.

What else? The Administration should reconsider its stated intention to continue the practice of manipulating photos for political purposes, and instead conduct a review of this episode, with the goal of new, publicly stated pro-truth guidelines to highlight the ethical and civic issues involved and improve practices in this area across society. The vast majority of Americans would support and admire this form of public leadership.

More broadly, we can learn from the pioneering work now taking place in Estonia and Ukraine. This work includes a comprehensive approach to teaching school children how images can be falsified, television programs devoted to exposing examples of manipulated images and videos, and mobilizing journalists and others in civil society to adopt and improve effective strategies for visual verification.

Relatedly, we can support the work of organizations such as the News Literacy Project, which works in the United States, and WITNESS, which works globally.

We have leaders who know what to do. The next and most important step is for America as whole to decide that this issue is vital to our civic life.

A version of this essay was published in the Deseret News on February 22, 2026.

For an actual, undoctored recent photo of Ms. Armstrong, as well as the falsified photo, see “White House Posts Photo Altered to Show Arrested Minnesota Protester Crying,” New York Times, January 22, 2026.

A second protester has been shot and killed in Minneapolis, which makes more urgent than ever the need for an independent commission to investigate the violence. But that won’t happen unless a lot changes.

Once again, many people seem already to have taken sides. Administration officials have made it clear in dramatic language that they already know what happened and where guilt and innocence lie. They’ve also made it clear that they do not intend to cooperate with local officials, or with anyone, to conduct what might plausibly be called an independent investigation.

We may be crossing the Rubicon. It’s alien to our values and form of government for our leaders to refuse, in cases such as these, to conduct investigations guided by established rules in which all facts are considered prior to reaching conclusions. A country that no longer seeks to determine truth according to impartial procedures rather than politically desired outcomes is no longer a functioning republic, at least in the sense that the American founders intended.

More broadly, it appears likely that things in Minneapolis will get worse before they get better. Much of Minneapolis civil society is determined to oppose and publicly protest the federal government’s actions, and the federal government seems equally determined to stay the course and even double down.

I remember as a child in Mississippi witnessing the “Mississippi Summer”of 1964, in which my state became, for much of the nation, a symbol of everything that was going wrong regarding civil rights for African-Americans. Many people from across the country went to Mississippi that summer to assist the civil rights movement, and two of them were murdered (a third victim was from Mississippi).

It may be that Minneapolis is becoming, again for much of the nation, just such a symbol. We may be approaching a time of reckoning.