Protest signs have never really been the height of discourse.
Sometimes they’re clever, sometimes witty. Sometimes they sketch around the outlines of an interesting argument.
That isn’t really their point, though, and you’re not going to fit a nuanced look at geopolitics or community building on a 2′x4′ piece of foam board. So, mostly, protest signs call out the demands you’ve heard so many times before. They’re slogans; they’re cheers; they’re threats—we could have come with pitchforks, they offer, but we brought these instead.
So I don’t expect to see arguments, exactly, on the NOM protestors’ signs. But perhaps I expected synecdoche. Something about health, or abuse, or AIDS, or children, or the abuse of unhealthy AIDS children.
Honestly, I didn’t expect unmitigated tautology. That one was actually a surprise.
My favorite, from back in the day, was always “US Out Of North America!”