Anxiety Reliever

San Francisco’s Great Highway Fills With Homemade Signs of Hope as Election Looms

The main message couldn’t be clearer: ‘Your vote matters’

Matt Charnock
3 min readOct 20, 2020

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Hand-painted signs that say “vote” and “the function of freedom is to free someone else.”—Toni Morrison.
A sign on the Great Highway. Photo: Matt Charnock

Anxiety Reliever is a TBI series that highlights a piece of good Bay Area news each week to help break up your doomscrolling— and instead give you something uplifting to read. If you have a tip for a future post in the series, email us or DM us on Twitter or Instagram.

Recently, pedestrians walking, running, and cycling along San Francisco’s Great Highway along Ocean Beach —one of our favorite car-free streets in SF — have been greeted with some new scenery: an array of homemade signs (and one large piece of installed public art) encouraging everyone to get out and vote.

Now, with just 15 days until the most important election of our lives, it’s a message the masses need to especially heed.

“We first noticed them last Sunday on a walk with ourdogs [two border collies],” Colleen and Ethan Morris told me Monday morning while I was out on a run before I gawked and fawned over their adorable fur babies. “This is one of our favorite car-free streets in the city, and there’s always something new along with it.”

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Matt Charnock

SF transplant, coffee shop frequent; tiny living enthusiast. iPhone hasn’t been off silent mode in nine or so years. Former EIC of The Bold Italic.