This Column Is Inoffensive

[from 3/3/10]

Last year, city council member Tim Burgess promised us an anti-panhandling ordinance. It's ready! It has morphed into an anti-aggressive solicitation law. I am NOT going to say ANYTHING about whether the proposed ordinance is wrong or not. That's not my job. I am only going to indicate some of its potential as inspiration for mild and entirely inoffensive humor, which in NO WAY expresses my own opinion.

For example. Let's say it's 4:30 PM and you just parked your BMW at 5th and Wall, and you go to the parking pay station and realize you accidentally left your wallet at home. No problem, you think, because you can find change under the front seat. But when you feed the meter you discover you're 50 cents short of what you need to cover you till 6 PM. So you politely ask a passing pedestrian if they can spare 50 cents. You tell them you're no panhandler, you even offer to return their 50 cents by mail with interest, if they will provide an address. Being less than 15 feet from yourself and at a parking meter, the Tim Burgess ordinance then (this is absolutely true!) DEFINES your behavior as aggressive solicitation, subject to a $50 fine!

We will have a law on the books that contains statements such as these: "The mere act of solicitation is not intimidating conduct," and "The mere act of solicitation without intimidation is not aggressive solicitation." Next year, expect an ordinance that prohibits aggressive miming. It will specifically assert, "The mere act of miming is not intimidating conduct, but, hey, nobody likes mimes except art students and visiting French Canadians, so... " Ha, ha, that's funny because it's SO true! AND it entirely doesn't offend anyone! By the way, the Burgess law WILL outlaw miming with a hat out for change. That's covered under the clause that prohibits alarming gestures while making a solicitation. (All mime is alarming to reasonable people.) But miming just to be a jack-off will still be legal!

The Burgess ordinance also contains language like this: "intentionally blocking or interfering with a person by any means while making a solicitation, including unreasonably causing the person to take evasive action to avoid physical contact, blah, blah,.. " and "intentionally using physical gestures or profane or abusive language that would cause fear or alarm to a reasonable person while making a solicitation blah, blah, blooie, blah... "

So, in other words, what we have here is an ordinance that gets you a fine for blocking and interfering with a person, forcing them to take evasive action, intentionally using physical gestures or profane or abusive language that would cause fear or alarm ONLY while making a solicitation!

You'll still be able to do any of that just so long as you DON'T ask for money! It'll be OK for the purposes of this ordinance, which very reasonably only tries to stop these behaviors under limited circumstances, so as not to drain the resources of our over-worked police.

I'm looking forward to more laws like this. For example, we could have a law against driving drunk, while having a vanity license. Why stretch our resources too thin, going after humble drunk drivers, too?

Obligatory irrelevant digression. In 1981, I was at 45th and U Way, late for a very important Go class, when a man with a clip-board stepped up to me and begged me to answer a survey question. The question was, "Is it better to stop or continue?" I said "Stop or continue what?" He said it didn't matter. Then, when I told him he was a moron, he called me an asshole. Can we have a law against people like that? It was very frustrating to me that my only recourse was to walk away from the moron without giving him the answer he wanted. I so needed retribution. A $50 fine would have been nice, or perhaps a policeman could have subjected him to unwanted mime.