Socialist Action /August 2002
Where Standing Still and Minding Your
Own Business is a Crime
By ADAM RITSCHER
I keep imagining a sign. It's big and green, with white lettering. It
hangs over the highway, and it looks like this:
Or maybe it isn't over the highway-it could be hanging off the side of
city hall with bright flashing Las Vegas lights. "Seven hundred dollars,"
you'd think to yourself, staring at its bright red fluorescence.
You won't ever see that sign, though.
Duluth has a new anti-loitering ordinance. Businesses apply to have "pedestrian-transit
zones" put outside of their locations by making a $100 deposit. If
the City Council says it's alright, those zones can be put on any sidewalk,
path, skywalk, way, trail, parkway, or other city property.
What do pedestrian-transit zones do? The city tells us that they make
life convenient. Hereís how: despite a few technicalities (such as
law enforcement), the only allowed behavior in a pedestrian-transit zone
is, ìtraveling from one point to another, as evidenced by constant
movement through the zone to a point or points outside the zone.î
They even specify that "frequent, repetitive movement within the zone,
back and forth, is not allowed."
Get caught with your sneakers still, and it could be a $700 hole in your
pocket.
For many people, the immediate reaction is, "Can they do that?"
But we'll leave constitutional semantics to the lawyers.
The real question is, "Why would they do that?" The ordinance's
statement of purpose emphasizes convenience and safety. What that really
means is that our beloved downtown area is inhabited by homeless people,
drunken people, panhandlers, and young people.
Yeah, it's true: we've got poor people, and we've got dirty people, and
we've got kids with blue hair. What this ordinance dares to do, though,
is wipe them off the face of our city. It will fail, of course; even if
a homeless man doesn't ask you for 50 cents, he's still here, he's still
a member of this community, and he's still standing alone somewhere-cold
and hungry.
But it will succeed in vanquishing truth and honesty in our city. It
will desecrate our civil liberties in the name of a pretty image-in the
name of our tourist economy; in the name of money. Most of all it will cover
up the truth. It will feed us a lie, a false image of this city-one that
is pampered and sterile.
And it will divide us.
Homelessness, impoverished youth, public acts of indecency, and panhandling-these
things are not the problem, they are the result of the problem. They are
simply the symptoms of a disease, and not the disease itself.
What is the disease? The disease is a lack of compassion-understanding
for each other. The disease is a lack of opportunity-poverty and jobs that
hardly pay (ones which could be performed as close as Minneapolis for sometimes
double the wage). The disease is an attitude of fear, which separates us
neatly into labeled subgroups. The disease is a lack of community.
The city has taken to covering up Duluth's problems. This ordinance is
not a solution, it is a band-aid for a decadent community. This ordinance
is a futile lie.
And it's a lie that we will not stand for. The outrage incurred by this
ordinance has birthed a resistance movement. It's called the Coalition for
the Freedom to Stand Still, because we believe that everyone has that right,
and we refuse to give that right away in the name of this tourist economy.
These are our goals:
(1) We are committed to the identification and enactment of tangible
solutions to the real problems of Duluth. We refuse to cover them up and
look the other way as the city has done.
(2) We are committed to the elimination of the new anti-loitering ordinance.
It is an injustice that we will not stand for.
(3) We are committed to encouraging responsible, compassionate behavior
from all members of the community.
For more information contact cfss@gate.net
or write to P.O. Box 16853 Duluth, MN 55816.
Socialist Action /August 2002 |