Things We Ought to Leave Alone

I was out by Vista Boulevard yesterday morning, just putting miles on the truck and thoughts in my head, when I noticed the billboard. You can’t miss it—it sits right off I-80 hanging in the air like a tombstone.

“They went to a music festival and didn’t come home.”

I’d passed it before, maybe a week ago. It stopped me cold then.

No politics, no finger-pointing—just a quiet statement of grief. Something about the wording reminded me of a headstone.

There’s a heaviness in words like that. They don’t need to shout to say everything.

But that day, the sign was defaced. Spray paint, rushed and angry: “Free Palestine.”

I pulled off and parked a little way up, just sat there a minute. No radio. Just the creak of the truck cooling in the sun. I didn’t take a picture. Didn’t call anyone. I just watched it sit there, caught between grief and graffiti, and I felt, well, older than I did when I woke up.

I’ve been around long enough to know the world doesn’t come with clear-cut good guys and bad guys. I’ve seen suffering on both sides of every border you can name, and probably a few you can’t.

But there’s a difference between protest and desecration. The billboard didn’t declare war; it remembered the dead. And there ought to be some places, even now, where silence still has the final word.

I started thinking about my dad. He’d always say, “If you can’t leave a place better than you found it, at least don’t leave it worse.”

He meant it about campsites, mostly, but I think he was onto something larger. I think about him a lot these days.

Maybe because there’s not as much quiet left in the world. Or maybe because grief, once it lands in your life, doesn’t ever leave—it just changes shape.

The co-founder of the group who put up that sign said the defacement shows how rampant antisemitism is. I don’t doubt it.

People forget, or maybe they never knew, that October 7 was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. That billboard wasn’t trying to win an argument; it was bearing witness.

Driving away, I couldn’t stop thinking about how quickly people forget the human part of all this. Behind every slogan, every spray-painted slogan, are people. Sons. Daughters. Lovers. Friends.

There’s a whole world that never came home from that music festival. And someone saw fit to drown that out with a message that, whether meant to or not, spat on a memorial.

It’s easy to shout. Harder to sit still and listen. And even harder still to mourn someone you never met.

Anyway, the sign’ll get replaced. The vinyl scrubbed clean.

But I’ll remember what it looked like when kindness and cruelty shared a few feet of highway. And I’ll remember how quiet the world was in my truck when I saw it.

Some things deserve silence, and this was one of them.