I dunno if the Keene Robin Hoods are really picking on the heroic meter maids of Keene, New Hampshire.
one of them says he has suffered heart palpitations and is thinking about quitting his job.
That sounds really bad, and the staff and management of TUAK wish to offer their deep concern for the welfare of the dear meter maid parking inspector and wish him all the best in his new opportunity as a door greeter at Wal-Mart. Also, that would be really, really bad.
But I suspect the Free Keene kids are really just going around and sticking coins in meters and cards under windshield wipers, which doesn’t sound like the most heinous act of terrorism the nation has ever endured. If they’re really picking on the meter maids they should stop, because that would be stupid and counterproductive.
But not half so counterproductive as when the city sued them for it and got them in all the papers. Because now they’ve even got the smelly old desert hermit segment of the population blogging about them, which is pretty much the very model of media saturation. Way to let the whole silly thing blow over, city of Keene!
Its not the actual act that the governing class (of any stature) finds so threatening. Its the underlying worldview. The spreading idea that maybe the state is not the goal, maybe the people are the important thing. Couple that with the idea that ‘sticking it to the man’ can be a noble thing (while incidentally doing actual nice things, rather than petty and cruel criminality under the auspices of ‘Freedom Fighter’, which is the historical tact) and the authority figure sees the culture of state dependence slipping. Probably these kids aren’t a threat to authority directly, but their IDEAS are. Thought Criminals, all of them.
They do tease the meter maids by pointing out that they don’t get to ticket that car because the Robin Hoods got there first. Obviously intolerable. Waah.
Speaking as someone who was once desperate enough to be a Wally World door greeter… If the maids can’t take the stress of parking meter taunts, dealing with some of the freaks coming into the store will hospitalize them. Permanently.
(And for those who missed the connection, Keene is also the small, rural college town that bought an armed BearCat armored personnel carrier for their freaking SWAT team. And now we know why they need a SWAT team: Robin Hood. And Keene is the town where a judge just violated state law by repeatedly instructing a jury to apply the law only as he tells them to, without judging the law; with those instructions, the jury did convict a man of a victimless “crime”. Even folks who don’t think highly of the FSP are starting to consider Keene a horribly embarrsing blemish on the state.)
Damn I’m old(and glad of it). Back in the day, when that kind of hair was actually the rage, doing stuff like feeding someone’s meter would have been called a random act of kindness. Sad old world when an act of kindness becomes a criminal act.
We used to do it when I was young, just to annoy the universally-hated meter maids. But they didn’t have arrest powers as far as I know (and anyway it wasn’t illegal) and we didn’t think of it as sticking it to the State.
One of the inspectors, Linda Desruisseaux, said that one of the six liked to taunt her by saying, “Linda, guess what you’re not going to do today — write tickets.”
LOL
What a bunch of -pardon the expression- Pussies! At 16 I waged open warfare with our meter maids, I’d have a parked car in front of a meter as bait, when said foul maid stopped and got out her book, I’d have landed 6 to 8 water balloons upon her! The bystanders didn’t know whether a meter maid was mildly assaulted, or have decided to run for miss wet shirt ’78’.