Leading up to the 2020 presidential election, my wife and I planted a Biden/Harris sign in our front yard. This was a standard election-year practice; an anodyne statement of our political preference. Or so we thought.

Campaign signs had popped up all over our neighborhood. While the majority seemed to be for the Democrats, a fair number were for Trump/Pence. Signs, literally and figuratively, of our constitutional right to freedom of speech. Everybody gets to have their say, be they liberal, conservative, libertarian or independent.

A few days after making our candidate choices public, a man on a motorcycle started yelling at us every time he drove by our house. At the top of his lungs, as his Harley-Davidson sped past our home, he would shout over the roar of his snarling engine: “F#@king communists!” And he did this several times a day, never altering his angry two-word libel.

We thought this was funny, at first. We figured that we’d expressed our freedom of speech (planting the sign), and now he was just taking the opportunity to do the same (yelling at us), though in a decidedly more colorful manner. That was until we identified the man as someone who lived on our street, and his next-door neighbor warned us that this guy was volatile and possibly capable of violence.

Political emotions ran high in 2020. If they were high then, they’re off the chart now.

At a 2024 political rally in Ohio, former President Donald Trump said that if he is not elected this November, there will be a “bloodbath.” After the national media headlined his comment, Trump and his team went into quick-response/damage-control mode, claiming the statement was made “metaphorically,” and that he was talking about the auto industry.

Really? Taken in the context of Trump’s multiple calls for violence – beat up protesters at his rallies, shoot illegal immigrants crossing the border, execute his former military advisors for treason, incite a riotous crowd to storm the Capitol, allow police a “violent day” to reduce crime – one can’t help but wonder, even assume, that his natural inclination is to use violence to get the results he would like to see, our legal protections, cultural norms and democratic freedoms be damned.

So it was with a bit more trepidation that I planted a Harris/Walz sign in our front yard this election cycle. So far, no problems. I’ve read letters to the editor about stolen political signs; that’s an actual crime, unlike yelling crude epithets at your neighbors, though both are obnoxious and unnecessary.

If my neighbor wants to debate whether I subscribe to the communist ideology (I do not, by the way; I’m a confirmed capitalist and cheerleader for democracy), then let’s go have a beer somewhere and discuss it reasonably. I could tell him that I’ve voted for Republicans in the past, though I doubt that would assuage him. He might be upset that the candidates I voted for were women and call me a “feminazi.”

I’m not sure a person can be a communist and a Nazi at the same time, at least not without major cognitive dissonance. But then Trump, in a speech, lumped his rivals and critics all together, promising to “…root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country…” I guess Trump failed to take any political science or history courses at the Wharton School. Or simply failed them.

Maybe if my antagonistic neighbor and I met over a beer we could find some common ground, a shared interest, or at least a movie we both liked. “Top Gun: Maverick” might be a good candidate. Or “A Few Good Men.” Anything with Tom Cruise in it.

In 1933, in his inaugural speech, newly elected Franklin D. Roosevelt told a demoralized country in the depths of the Great Depression that the only thing America had to fear is fear itself – “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

Let’s take FDR’s words to heart. Still our fear, suppress our terror, not succumb to paralysis, and put our faith and trust in the sanity and goodness of the American people – our family, friends, neighbors and compatriots.

I might even drive past my neighbor’s house, roll down my car window, and shout out to him, “Peace, brother!” That might take the starch out of his anger. Threats of violence have no place in political discourse. Too easily, it turns real.