Two items from the morning’s press, illustrate the
difficulty of finding guidance in the Categorical Imperative, when the snow hits the fan.
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| Always keep a copy in your glove-compartment! |
(1) The tragedy of the commons
An op-ed in the wake of “Snowzilla”, followed by a reader’s
comment.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-snow-parking-20160125-story.html
Note to Baltimoreans: That parking spot you shoveled out isn't yours
The message was taped to the
windshield of a pickup truck parked on a public street:
"This parking space did not
magically shovel itself! Be considerate of your neighbors and other people in
the neighborhood. DON'T steal parking spaces that people worked for several
hours to clear."
The parking space didn't magically
pave itself, either — the taxpayers, presumably including the owner of the
pickup truck, paid for that — but that point seems to have eluded the anonymous
author of this angry missive.
And how can it take "several
hours" to shovel the snow out of a parking space? What was the author
using to remove the snow, a thimble?
Every time it snows in Baltimore, I
am reminded of the words of noted philosopher and humanitarian (and former Sun
columnist) Kevin Cowherd: "God forbid we ever get a real emergency around
these parts. We'll be eating our children before the sun goes down."
You know the drill. People get out
their snow shovels and clear just enough snow to make room for two wheel
tracks. Then, after pulling the car out into the street, they put their chairs
down in the parking space, to protect the results of "hours" of
backbreaking labor, and incidentally making it impossible for snowplows to get
through. Then we have a thaw and a freeze, and everything turns into solid ice,
with only half as many parking spaces there would be if people had concentrated
on getting the snow out of the way instead of guarding "their"
parking spaces.
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[Comment] Boston dealt with the place markers
by picking up everything that was left on the street and carting it away. The
natives were outraged but the city stuck to their guns and cleared everything
away. Remember too that the mountain of snow they piled up did not melt till
last July and it included hundreds of lawn chairs.
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| Potzteufel ! Who the hell parked in my space ?? |
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/the-great-post-blizzard-parking-struggle-pleas-threats-and-lawn-chairs/2016/01/26/16826218-c464-11e5-8965-0607e0e265ce_story.html
In Washington, Nate Bergman spent
96 words stating his case, laser-printed and sealed in plastic.
He’d spent hours digging his car
out of a parking place on a Capitol Hill street. He duly acknowledged the legal
right of other drivers to take the public space. He appealed to their better
natures not to. If that didn’t work, he promised to shovel the snow back to its
“original place around your vehicle.” In all, a measured treatise touching on
individual liberty and shared responsibility.
In Philadelphia, an unnamed
shoveler made the same claim more succinctly: “If you park in my space, I’ll
break your [expletive] windows. Have a nice day.”
The death struggle for
post-blizzard parking is playing out in different ways in different places all
along the East Coast. But few have escaped the plunge into anarchy that erupts
when two feet of snow smothers already limited on-street parking.
To the diggers, the moral high
ground is clear: Shoveling 300 pounds of snow from a patch of public pavement
is like homesteading on the frontier. I cleared it — I own it.
Not so, say the defenders of the
commons. Those lawn chairs, pylons and sawhorses standing guard on city streets
are squatting on taxpayer property.
“No one owns a parking space,” D.C.
Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier said at a news conference Saturday, appealing to
citizens to keep their furniture off the streets.
Before the storm even hit,
Philadelphia police used a spoof of Drake’s “Hotline Bling” to urge residents
to report any illegal cones or trash cans blocking parking spaces. They dubbed
it #NoSavesies.
In Boston, which has a long history
of snow-related parking disputes, an umbrella group of several South End
neighborhood associations banned space saving last year. Now the South End
Forum is raising money to compensate drivers when their cars are vandalized by
angry space diggers. There were scores of confrontations over parking this week
all over the city, including a nonfatal shooting Monday in Dorchester
The moral hair splitting baffled
even experts. When does a private citizen earn a claim to a public resource?
It’s an ethical whiteout.
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| Die angewandte "Metaphysik der Sitten" |
(2) Poster-children vs. free riders
That which is held in one half of the brain, is
simultaneously rejected in the other.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/26/world/europe/corsico-italy-school-lunch-fees.html
CORSICO, Italy — After being
elected last year, Mayor Filippo Errante found that this town, abutting Milan,
had accrued an “alarming” debt of more than a million euros in unpaid school
lunch fees. So he decided to take what he called an iron-fist approach.
Children whose parents were up to
date on payments would be allowed to eat cafeteria-prepared meals. Children
whose parents had not paid would not.
“The era of the ‘furbetti’ is over,” Mr. Errante said in
a statement on social media last month, using a term that translates to
cunning, akin to gaming the system.
Some called the decision a form of
blackmail. Others criticized it for creating what they said was a schoolroom
apartheid, where some children ate hot meals while the others snacked on
homemade panini or a slab of cold pizza.
Petitions and protests ensued. Teachers, principals and many parents
rallied in support of those children who would not be given lunches, even as nearly
all agreed that school fees should be paid.
The children most affected by the
provision belong to families whom Mr. Tortoreto described as “lemons that have
already been squeezed dry” by life.
Some are the children of foreigners without legal permission to remain
in Italy, others of parents with a history of mental illness.
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