MTA'holes

The braggadocio me says, “Yep, I called it!” The old fart me blames texting for the idiocratic inability to have a memory or attention span that could possibly reach back to April. April! The frustrated civic writer in me wants to learn three foreign languages just to have a large enough vocabulary to throttle these pricks in print and destroy them.

Again, we just went through this in April. April! In my piece, Congestion Pricing: Be A Snot-Nosed Rich Prick, I spelled out a near epic list of arguments that should have come up in the battle to keep New York City’s East River and Harlem River crossings free from the disgustingly greedy power-monger lies and their dollar sign, cartoon eyeballs. Moreover though, debunked point after debunked moronic point was expressed as one common warning. I warned that congestion pricing initiatives would keep popping up again and again, with new names, new ways to mitigate objections, and new efforts to grab our hard-earned, recession pinched cash from the thin air left in our pockets. Never, though, in my wildest dreams did I think we’d be facing the same deplorable classists and their crusade to wrench money, if even through our collective anuses, less than seven months after the exact same proposed methodology was laughed out of Albany. Seven months! They’re baaaa-aaaack, at least a veritable cultist subset of them.

This time around, it’s the MTA, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, that’s out to do it. Yes, it’s the same Metropolitan Transit Authority mentioned in my historical Triborough Bridge argument. This is the same MTA, the company, that already controls that bridge and others, all the NYC subways, and all the NYC buses. Despite their near constant subway and bus fare hikes in my dozen years here, their recent takeover of all the private bus companies and routes within the city limits, their never ending push for folks to use mass transit, their massive job eliminations and rolling token booth closures, their near triennial bridge toll hikes, and their mass marketing of subway themed products that did not exist just a decade ago, they are somehow broke again. Functionally on the heels of their last birthed subway and bus fare hike that was supposed to quash their then alleged deficit, instead rumored to actually have been a multi-million dollar surplus amidst their public refusal to allow NYC to examine their books, the MTA'holes are now claiming a new 1.9 billion dollar budget gap that is estimated to reach 3 billion by next year. I guess your last fare hike didn’t work!

To close this gap, they will use the bailout driven economic environment to request rescue funds from city and/or state sources. When they don’t get that, because the city and state are trying to close gaps of their own and because government would be more than happy to take over the subway and buses in the event of an MTA failure, they are going to shoot for the moon with a plan to grab the Brooklyn Bridge, the Manhattan Bridge, the Williamsburg Bridge, and the Queensboro Bridge (a.k.a 59th Street Bridge), as well as all the remaining smaller bridges that cross the Harlem River, and covert them from free thoroughfares to tolled ones. In other words, their plan to bail themselves out of another reputed economic failure of the NYC subway system, is to charge drivers of cars. Pardon me, dickwods, but isn’t that like raising Amtrak fares to pay for jet fuel?

Now, dumbass ideas knowing no bounds, the MTA plan fails to stop there. It does not stop at glomming seven bridges currently owned and run by the city, for free, to transform them into giant, unlimited ATMs. No. Another part of the plan is to simultaneously raise the subway and bus fares a full dollar or, in other words, to do exactly what charging drivers is hypothetically supposed to prevent.

But wait there’s more! This simultaneum will additionally be congruent with MTA layoffs, closures, and downsizing including the elimination of certain trains and bus routes. So, straphangers already paying the highest per ride fare in the country will now pay a full dollar more per ride (raised from $2.00 to $3.00) for less service and be forced to cope with larger crowds within that remaining service. Plus, for that headache, will they even get the feeling of security that might be knowing their dependable subway system is at all solvent? No! This ridiculous act of pay more, much more, get less, gleans absolutely nothing. It is an arbitrary fare increase that, according to the very people threatening the increase, will not help. Instead, they have to snatch a bunch of bridges they never had before and use them to charge ALL drivers, yes ALL drivers, who have absolutely nothing to do with a subway system deficit.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, but he only visits MTA Board Chairman H. Dale Hemmerdinger and then blows him!

Okay, so here’s the obligatory “to be fair” paragraph. To be fair, the MTA plan has not released how exactly it would rend these bridges from city ownership, making the plan seem to New Yorkers like a longshot. To be fair, they have included one idea that I hadn’t seen in the defunct NYC Congestion Pricing proposal which is to not toll via booths, but via EZ-Pass scanners and traffic cameras that photograph license plates, both thereafter sending drivers a bill in the mail. That’s all I can give them. The rest of the idea shits on us profusely.

Hey Hemmerdinger, let’s not pat ourselves on the back for the traffic camera and scanners idea just yet! Firstly, it’s not the MTA’s idea. If you were creative thinkers, you wouldn’t be proposing the very same idea that was just trounced in April.

“I’m gonna buy that failed ice cream parlor on the corner of Nowhere and Nonesuch and make it into my own ice cream parlor! I’m a genius!”

Secondly, where have I heard the anti-camera argument before? Oh yeah, in my piece My New NYC Revenue Proposal: The Civilian Ticket Patrol. I may have employed a little reverse psychology there, but can anyone truly ignore the resulting cry of disgruntled NYC citizens who yearn for privacy?

Look, just like I’d written, the idea has expectedly resurged again with a few minor changes in hopes of masquerading as a new idea. At the very outset, that’s its own reprehensible problem. It states that tolling the free bridges of central New York and charging your own residents to get to work is the only idea anybody has to close budget gaps. Freakin’ automatons!

Duh, let’s toll the bridges and make millions a week. No? Um, okay let’s toll the bridges and make millions a week. No good? Okay, let’s toll the bridges and make millions per week and also raise existing fares!

Still though, outside of an extreme lack of thought and creativity on the part of every person strapped with closing a budget gap, most of my original arguments still work to fight this new incarnation. The checklist balances like this.

Booth troubles – No longer an argument
Exporting traffic angle – No longer an argument

Still – Punishes people who are doing the right thing
Still – Not a green initiative
Still - Charges people to get to and/or from their own neighborhoods
Still – Ignores tell-tale Triborough Bridge History
Still – Ignores the tell-tale “one city” history of bridges
Still – Unfairly segregates Queens and Brooklyn from Manhattan
Still – Ignores logical and historical toll function
Still – Unfairly charges 150,000 – 275,000 pregnant commuters yearly
Still – Reads a poor choice for toll placement
Still – Mimics the poor effects of the New Jersey Port Authority toll hikes

Newly – Charges drivers to close a subway budget gap
Newly – Fails to ask why the last plan and hike didn’t work
Newly – Creates less service for more money
Newly – Presumes that what was not a good idea seven months ago is a good idea now
Newly – Puts all remaining transit choices in the hands of a nearly untouchable, independent company with a captive client base


With all these counter-arguments, why do I think the plan has legs enough to get through if we don’t fight it? Well, it was the Mayor of the city that just tried and failed to toll most of the same bridges. It’s not such a far fetched argument that this way the MTA could simply ask for the bridges and the city could say, “Here, please take them off of our hands for free.” At least the old plan was going to get us millions from the federal government to improve mass transit. The new plan gets nada. Oh, did I mention the Mayor appoints four of the MTA Board members? Did I mention he also wants stuff from them?

Plus, I think it is no error that such a plan is being proposed right at the post-election change-over of local powers from the old guard who stomped down congestion pricing to a new guard that, in some cases, wasn’t even involved in the battle.

Also, the city and state, trying to close their own budget gaps, might jump at the chance to cross off bridge maintenance and reconstruction from their line items.

My friends, I understand belt tightening and fiscal responsibility better than most. I understand the drastic measures that must be taken by our government (not our companies) to fix stupid spending decisions passed. I believe that, having chosen to live here, part of that burden will actually be my own. This does not change the fact that an illogical, poor, mean-spirited, hurtful, non-creative, never-ending and counter-intuitive plan will ever be acceptable. We will go to war and take lives as a last resort in the name of saving lives. We don’t, however, get to take money in the name of saving money, even as a last resort. It doesn’t work. Why, is this, then, everybody’s very first resort?

You know, with world events being what they are, New Orleans an orphaned city, Wall Street in shambles, the U.S. auto industry castigated, successful terrorist attacks seemingly non-stop and everywhere, global climate change, foreclosure after foreclosure; I must just come off as some little runt who doesn’t want to pay six to twenty bucks a day for a round trip to work. Okay, granted. I never want to pay money for what was once free. But every single one of these disastrous world events is at least partially a result of poor and uninsightful decision making on massive scales. I am talking about one such massive decision on a massive scale impacting more than just mass transit, but all transit. Can we not learn enough from our previous approaches to poor decisions to examine the problem differently in the moment? Can we not identify what is wrong with a proposed “solution,” all the things that are wrong with a proposed “solution,” and then move on to something else? How can a government that just seven months ago debated both sides of an issue and deemed one side bad for New York at all entertain that same side of that same issue in a plan by a private organization? It shouldn’t be allowed. They should tell the MTA, “We just spent and lost millions of our own dollars to prove your plan isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. Now don’t come back until you think of something else!”

Now that we see that no voice here, except perhaps my own, has any new or creative ideas, we can further see the nauseatingly repeated plan to toll the free bridges in its truer category. Tolling free bridges is not a plan. It’s giving up. It’s throwing in the towel. It’s getting the supposedly greatest financial and political minds together in a room for months on end just for them to conclude, “Fuck it! This is too hard. Just toll those bridges! We don’t even care who makes the money at this point.” There are more creative solutions. Just listen to your people. You are not going to get an all-in-one gift solution. It’ll be a package. It’ll be the creative efforts of bunches of smaller, positive programs that help you reach your goals. It’s like paying for college. You contribute some, your parents contribute some, you get a school scholarship, a private scholarship, a grant, a student loan, and work study. You’ll have to do the leg work to put together a positive and reasonable package of many ideas that work. I know that people who are used to having the money around hate the new leg work to dig up dollar sources. I know they want a fairy to hit them on the head with a wand and say, “Make a wish.” Get real. Get to work. If you’ve got a budget gap, the answerS ARE somewhere in your budget.

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My NYC New Revenue Proposal: The Civilian Ticket Patrol

Okay, I am preparing myself for a veritable FLOOD of comments, not to mention people with pitchforks and torches outside of my door. Damn! I think they’re here. Read fast!

In the recent blog entry I’d posted about congestion pricing, I did something out of literati-wanna-be character for myself. I panned a plan without offering an alternative solution. I did so to stay on topic, of course, but also because I’d already skull-numbed Chappy and Bullet with two epic posts in a week. I’m sure the slight misuse of the oh so common words “autocentric” and “nary” didn’t help with flow. This blog entry will, in fact, offer one alternative solution to raising revenue in NYC whilst curtailing traffic and gridlock in Manhattan proper, if not the city at large. But, the content of this suggestion will doubtlessly ruffle enough feathers that there’ll be a virtual dirt nap in my blogging future. Here Lies Pockets, Rest In Pants.

A great number of cities and townships in the states now boast everyone’s favorite traffic control device, the red light camera, otherwise known as the Ticket Camera or #@!$%^&^%!! If you are unfamiliar, count your blessings and your money. This is a camera or set of cameras automatically snapping photos at an intersection with the express purpose of ticketing driver’s who violate red traffic signals. Photos are snapped, the license plate is captured in the image, and a high-priced summons arrives in the registrant driver’s mail along with a photo of her/his alleged infraction some time after. Gotcha! “But that was a harmless night of chicken plucking, birch beer, and the Wu Tang Clan. I can’t believe those bastards did this to me!”

Absent from common knowledge was the manner in which age-old laws and rules of law enforcement in many states had to radically change to allow for the devices. To use one east coast county as our looking glass, it had always been procedure that reports of crimes and violations could reach a sector car in one of three ways. A call could come in via police radio. A bystander could run up to the car and point officers in the direction of a crime taking place or a person in need. The cops could react to witnessing a crime themselves while on patrol, pretty much necessary for lesser moving violations. This permissible three-fer procedure helped to prevent corruption. Limiting the initiating sources made it difficult to manufacture false evidence convincingly. Requiring that written reports begin factually with one of only three starting points made it far more difficult to take random or rogue action. For the same token, the three-pronged procedure also quelled the bearing of false witness by citizens. A person would have a more difficult time pinning a false crime report on the neighbor kid who porked his daughter if the process had to begin by talking to the police. A person couldn’t run up with a trick photo of a banker boffing a zebra in the playground without the promise of cops investigating. In all three cases, however, it was expected of cops to be PRESENT to bear out the proper response action. They had to go to where the infraction was taking place. They had to get on-scene. In fact, an officer’s written report or summons, the sole official document of each such event, was so predicated upon the importance of an authority figure’s first hand knowledge of an incident, that almost any contradictory claim was readily dismissed and lack of proper police report could make or break one’s argument in court.

Well, the red light camera has no such police presence. While the photo itself still goes through law enforcement personnel before ever reaching an accused’s mailbox, the photo is no longer first-hand knowledge, but barley second-hand knowledge. In fact, given the boundaries of a photograph, it is a limited second hand knowledge at that. It’s like a slutty reputation in high school or a belief that Dr. Pepper contains prune juice. Sure, all knowledge is limited, but clearly the minor point here is that a photograph will always be more limited than the knowledge of an officer on-scene. In some cases, under older law, some red light camera photos would prove little different than hearsay. Seesaw?

Thus, in many states, this required direct change to major legislation. For some other states and counties it meant simple additions to laws. For still others it meant finding adjudicative justifications within existing bodies of law when legislation was slow to change. Some places simply shifted the onus of clear determination from the law enforcement level to an already backlogged judicial level, people showing up to fight all sorts of red light camera photos only to predominantly lose in the end. “Yes, I did run the red light, but as you can see in the photo, my penis was caught in the vent window!” What’s more, legislation change was not the limit to problems with red light camera philosophy. For instance, unlike a parking ticket where a vehicle is still, is it not counter-intuitive to presume true witness to a MOVING VIOLATION in a STILL photograph? The legal shift, middlingly justified by a government attempt to make roads safer, is certainly one in favor of big brother, big government, big revenue, and tech’ solutions over human ones.

It is because of these inherent fallacies in red light camera programs, that while acknowledging noticeable decreases in traffic accidents at equipped intersections, I have to disagree on a fundamental level with their application.

Don’t hoist me as the hero just yet. You are about to hate the playa.

What if, just what if, despite my distaste for red light camera programs, I asserted a newer, wider application of these changes in law? No, not stoning. Well…

My chief argument against congestion pricing in the post noted earlier was that it punishes the people already doing the correct thing, an unjust act of wrongfulness no matter how one explains its “need.” If I purport my assertion to be a blockbusting bill-killer in all future congestion pricing proposals, then I need to acknowledge my claim’s inverse. I need to support ideas which only punish wrongdoers and spare already error-free commuters any hassle. I have such an idea. I like it. I call it the Civilian Ticket Patrol. Bum--ba-duh-dump.

If our legislation has already been eased to allow "police absence / tech’ presence" style evidence in the form of still pictures, then it is not that far of a leap to do something similar with motion pictures. Video cameras can easily capture far more moving violation types than a still camera. Illegal u-turns, blown stop-signs, failures to yield, failures to signal, equipment violations, one-way street violations, illegal turns, fender-benders, these can all be SEEN on video. Video devices mounted in the grills and on the dashboards of police vehicles already do this during routine traffic stops. One merely needs to check out The World’s Scariest Police Chases or Cops to see how many precincts and sheriff’s offices use this tool to great evidentiary achievement. Well, instead of "police absence / tech’ presence," why not "police absence / citizen-tech’ presence?"

I reluctantly propose that we implement a system whereby city citizens with registered, insured, personal vehicles can choose to have their vehicles outfitted with similar motion picture capture devices at no charge. The system would need to be a closed system that disallows tampering. A driver’s only interface with the system would be a keypad that marks a starting and ending video time index to bracket a moving violation they’ve just witnessed, and perhaps a wireless upload switch to the police department or an ejectable, lockbox media to mail-in to the police. The device would need to be well hidden for citizen safety. The interface component would only work when the Citizen Patroller had her/his own vehicle parked, again with regard to safety. Video would be automatically time and date stamped and uniquely coded with the video capture unit number. Ejectable lockbox media would not be accepted at the police department if it showed any signs of breakage or tampering. I would suggest a wide angle lens set with a focal point broad enough to pick up street signs and oncoming cars. I'd also suggest a GPS feature to further add to the information gathered.

On the front end, citizen selection for the program would be key. Interested parties would be put on a waiting list. Nobody with outstanding parking or moving violations, criminal records or warrants would be eligible. No one without a current driver’s license would be eligible. Nobody with pending court cases would be eligible. Nobody with orders of protection or orders of protection against them or other legal documentation implying potential grudges would be eligible. No hunchbacks. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

Participant citizens would receive training on the interface, training on what constitutes a moving violation, training on recognizing non-viable video capture (both technologically and with regard to the law), and training on safe use of the tool (CTP procedure). Citizen’s would NOT be pulling cars over or issuing tickets themselves. Citizen’s would NOT be patrolling, but merely capturing moving violations in their day-to-day doings around the neighborhood. Jeez, Louise, I “happen” across 10 creative moving violations a day just going from my apartment to the babysitter’s place. Good evidence, chained properly and resulting in adjudication against a violator would yield a percentage of the revenue collected on the ticket back to the video capturing citizen’s pocket. Money! Money taken from the “bad people” and given to the “good people.” Holy cow, I’m Robin Hood!

On the back end, more cops/legal officials would need to take more time to witness the video captured evidences. (Video takes longer to see than a photo.) These officials would be the sole deciders as to whether a ticket is warranted and issued on the video or not, just like red light camera photos, retaining the proper decisive authority where it belongs. Time and date stamps would determine the immediacy with which a video was received. Cops should be given the authority to simply throw away any video evidence that arrives long after the date stamp (preventing people from saving up incriminating evidence). Cops should be given a workable CTP database for cross-checking and the authority to discard any video evidence received from the same patroller on the same vehicle more than once, to prevent stalking, blackmail, entrapment, and varied forms of citizen corruption.

There would need to be oversight provisos aplenty. Any willful violation of CTP procedure and policy would result in immediate shutdown and removal of the apparatus from the citizen's personal vehicle at the owner’s expense, even getting towed to do so, if not her/his own arrest. Further, CTP procedure violators should be fined at least ALL monies collected through their actions on previous captures. Such violations should include but not be limited to

1) Speaking to the violator caught on video
2) Sending in more than one (or pick a reasonable number) video violations on the same vehicle
3) Any indication of device, data, or media tampering
4) The interruption of any police officer in the course of her/his duties
5) Evidence of entrapment.
6) Breaking motor vehicle law in order to capture some one else breaking motor vehicle law
7) Posing as a police officer
8) Expired driver’s license
9) Expired vehicle insurance
10) Expired vehicle registration
11) Failure to pay one’s own tickets
12) Video capture of the patroller’s own vehicle in a moving violation
13) Equipment used to spy.

For years police departments have talked about citizen’s being the eyes and the ears of their neighborhoods. They express actual regret in not being able to protect everyplace at once. They beg neighborhood watches to be on the lookout, commuters to keep eyes open for suspicious behaviors and objects, victims to report crimes against them, and building/business owners to install security cameras. The Civilian Ticket Patrol is an extension of that very want. While it utilizes an existing segment of law that I find somewhat deplorable, there are a great deal of long sought after complications that a program like this might well resolve.

Let’s examine.

The practice only punishes those who are breaking the law, as opposed to blanketing the entire area with new rules and fees that target innocents and traffic violators equally.

It spreads the eyes and ears of otherwise official units charged with preventing traffic violations out among as large and invisible a cross–segment of the city population as any city is willing to fund.

Unlike red light cameras which groups frequently document and post online to create a map of avoidable intersections, these cameras are mobile; they can be at any place at any time, a truly more effective deterrent to traffic violation than a stationary, visible camera.

This can easily put a little extra money in ordinary people’s pockets without the lengthy governmental red tape of raising minimum wage, encouraging new local business, or creating jobs. Once up and running it is quite an immediate return for both city and citizens.

As stated before, a video system would capture far more types of infraction than a single, red light camera can.

Former New York City Mayor Giuliani, and to a certain extent, the now NYC Mayor Bloomberg have frequently asserted that the best action to curtail gridlock/traffic in Manhattan’s central business district would simply be for those on the road to follow the existing rules. New York City has signs at so many of it’s major intersections warning “Don’t Block the Box,” meaning, do not enter an intersection, even on a green light, if you cannot safely cross the entire intersection to the opposite side. A large number of these intersections have even painted a giant cross-hatching right onto the pavement so that drivers can see the “box” in question. Heck, many of the red light cameras in Manhattan were mounted for this express purpose. Much to the city’s surprise after implementing them, a great number of the red light scoffing culprits were their own city bus drivers. The point being, if officials insist that moving violations (not traffic volumes) are a direct cause of city gridlock, to the tune of implementing multi-million dollar systems targeted to decrease just one type of said violations, then they would have to agree that a newer system which targets MORE violation types in ALL areas would be superior and therefore more effective.

Sure, the Civilian Ticket Patrol would have its built-in limits. Civilian car to car video cannot accurately capture speeding, horn blowing, improper breaking distances, and so on. Such a system would even need to weed out the possibility of multiple videos captured of the same, distinct violation.

But, these circumstances are not why everyone to whom I suggest the idea is ready to string me up by my balls. People hate the idea because they like getting away with moving violations. “Come on. Everybody does it.” They have fervently convinced themselves that, if gone uncaught, a moving violation, even a serious one, never actually happened. They like putting a boot in the man’s ass. People mass-justify their own rule bending and breaking actions to such a vast degree that the idea of a factually legal driver is considered an outcast notion, an impossibility, and even a danger to other drivers. People like beating the odds. They seriously don’t mind paying a ticket or two over the years when compared to the twenty-thousand times they habitually got away with the same action. The Civilian Ticket Patrol would severely crop those odds. It might truly force a multiple offender to look at and to adjust to her/his own actions. If not, it might merely be a speedier path to getting licenses revoked, cars off the road, and nominal traffic flow in a thickly populated area.

All in all, we should not do it. My idea is not at all a nice way to collectively dis/allow folks to exercise American freedoms. Yet, if the only alternative is going to be congestion pricing or some other ill-begotten idea that charges everybody and punishes those who already play by the rules, I vote for my idea. The Civilian Ticket Patrol, gotcha!

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Congestion Pricing: Be A Snot-Nosed Rich Prick

Yes siree, if you live in the U.S. of A. it’s coming for you, and the only thing you can do to stop it is to keep an ear to the ground and recognize the greenback beast in all its many incarnations. The idea of congestion pricing, adding new tolls to some or all inbound roads into a city or central business district in the name of traffic control, is a sneaky shape-shifter of an idea recently, but barely, shot down for New York City. I’ve no doubt that it will be revisited, mayor after mayor, snot-nosed rich advisor after snot-nosed rich advisor, and suggested as a solution to every deficit until kingdom come. Learn to fight it here.

Background snippet de jour: New York City is a city made up of five boroughs on four differing land masses. When most people think about NYC, they think of Manhattan, an island. Staten Island, a separate island, is also part of The Big Apple. Brooklyn (Kings County) and Queens are actually city counties on the westernmost geographic body of Long Island (yet a third isle), while the Bronx finishes the city to the north looking to cartographers like a mutant uvula dangling rudely from the mainland. Smaller islands like Rikers Island, Wards/Randalls Island, Roosevelt Island, Governors Island, Coney Island, and the like are also part of NYC. The Hudson River (tidal estuary), Harlem River, East River, Arthur Kill, Atlantic Ocean, and Long Island Sound are a web of water bodies that carve up the city into its component parts, making it no surprise that the metropolis is vivaciously riddled with beautiful bridges of every length and style. Long story short, all the bridges and tunnels controlled by New Jersey’s Port Authority, are tolled. Most bridges controlled by the city itself are currently free. While this has made for some controversy over the years, certain New Yorkers able to get from home to work and back sans toll, others being forced to pay a toll to get into their own neighborhood, it’s not all that difficult to track. Bridges and tunnels closer to the outside of the city or entering the city are tolled, bridges closer to the center of the city are usually free.

Well, borrowing from current practices in places like London and Stockholm, this year saw “congestion pricing” suggested and narrowly defeated in NYC. The idea was to add new tolls to all the currently free Manhattan inbound bridges between certain streets. Functionally, this would have eradicated all remaining free rides on any major bridge. It was meant, in part, as a deterrent from driving for non-city residents. Problem was, the bridges proposed for said tolls are right in the middle of the place, effectively cutting off more than half of the city’s resident drivers from their destinations. I mean, wherever you live, imagine, for the moment, that there is only a single boulevard you can take to get to your job. Then imagine that somebody slapped a big toll booth right on that road. Starting to get the picture? Mayor Bloomberg backed it, pushed for it, and financed an obtuse battalion of elitists to hammer it through. No dice, even as the lie evolved. It was originally brought up as an idea to curtail traffic in Manhattan, but soon became touted as a green initiative. Lie!

What kills me about it is not the suggestion. Ideas come and go. I don’t even horribly much mind that the idea became lumped in with green initiatives. The Bloomberg administration has done quite a lot, in fact, to push through and to support multiple green initiatives, despite a small budget burp early in his 9-11 proximal mayoralty that temporarily quashed the city’s massive recycling program. The congestion pricing idea needed a recognizable home and gravitated toward the easiest one to lie about. What actually feels like the ice pick in my brain, instead, was the argument used by congestion pricing opponents, the freakin’ people on my side! The main argument they chose to combat congestion pricing was such a poor and almost unrelated argument that I am actually amazed this tolls nonsense didn’t pass with flying colors.

Congestion pricing opponents, again and again, chose to harp upon the idea that to toll the many remaining free bridges between Queens, Brooklyn, and Manhattan was a thinly veiled stratagem seeking to disenfranchise Queens and Brooklyn residents, an unfair tax. Often, without actually saying it, the insinuation was that Queens and Brooklyn, being among the most culturally diverse counties in the entire nation, were being discriminated against by Bloomberg and an army of Manhattanites. Pah-leeeeese! Really? Ten-thousand perfectly logical counter-arguments that could have shown congestion pricing for the poor idea that it was; countless obvious, common-sense reasons, any one of which could have defeated congestion pricing initiatives for a long time to come if not forever, and these concave skulls thought that a watered down version of a race card was the way to go?! They chose a “taxation without representation” argument for a fee that was not a tax and a group of people who they themselves represented? You know, despite the fact that I seem to live in an urban honeycomb of modern liberalism, I do see racism and bigotry every day. It’s here, it’s there, it exists, it’s real, it deserves to be challenged and fought. But to buy the argument that congestion pricing would unfairly “tax” a cross-section of the community even partially based on class or race means I would also have to believe that Bloomberg and his money making robots actually had some sort of investment in discriminating, a Berlin Wall agenda that starts with tolls and ends with a force field. I’d have to believe that Manahattanites, a mosaic of races and classes in and of their own demographic, didn’t simply and selfishly want less traffic around their homes, but also wanted Queens to evaporate and Brooklyn to just go away. It makes no sense. I am insulted by the very people sent to debate for my best interests.

Look, there are forces at work out there that are going to piggy-back a highly unfounded congestion pricing scenario onto every cause, every bill, every earmark they can. They’ll call it something different each time. They’ll renegotiate the price. They’ll petition the feds for backing. They’ll “mitigate” the impact. They’ll take surveys until people are bored with the subject. They’ll cite new impact studies from every angle. It’s not about any of that. It’s about money and only money. It’s about a few too many powerful people who are too self-righteous to sit in traffic like the rest of us, or dare I say, deign to take mass transit. It’s about an endless history of government waste and questionable spending practices that listless entrepreneurs will try to balance by charging the very people who their inane spending habits affected the most. It’s an untapped source of revenue over which businesspeople like Bloomberg salivate as they stare longingly at those poor, untolled, engineering marvels. A makeshift race card defense isn’t going to fly every single time this power brokerage rears its ugly haunches to piss on us.

That said, ringing true to even the soundest of Queens and Brooklyn minds, it’s all phrased as opinion. Opinions don’t win dink! This blog entry is not about my opinion. Imagine that! It is about equipping you, the reader, with all the actual arguments that should have been brought to bear in New York. It is about sharing the layer upon layer of common sense that was ignored from both sides in our case, so that you can adjust to your own city’s attempt at congestion pricing with a full and proper arsenal. I’ve no doubt that some cities are going to sneak it through, but before they do, they are going to have to contend with you and each and every single GOOD point you bring up at the hearings before getting it done. I’ll give you what I can. Please give me yours. Let’s work this out.

THE NYC ANTI-CONGESTION PRICING MASTER LIST:

First, let us just plainly and logically discount the notion that congestion pricing is a green initiative as proposed in NYC. Perhaps the simplest illustration I can borrow is the fact that all cars would be charged the same toll. Hybrid cars were not going through at half price. Alternative energy cars (like yet to be legalized hydrogen vehicles which only produce water as waste) are not getting through the tolls for free. There would be no pro-rate for cars that use less gas over cars that use more. There would be no 1955 singing Exxon team popping out of each toll booth to check under your hood and validate your energy prudence. If the heart of the matter is an ecological one, certainly no truly green mitigating provision was made in the congestion pricing proposal. Not green $8.00. Completely green, $8.00. Horse and buggy, $8.00. How stupid do they think we are?

Even if future editions of this farce crop up including discount provisions and passes, one still cannot justify the ADDED 40 minute to 2 hour wait that all drivers, hybrid, biodiesel, corn ethanol, and otherwise, would have to wait in the snaky line behind the toll booth. That’s not green. That’s not reasonable. If the current rush hour wait times on the highly tolled west side at the New Jersey bridges and tunnels are any indication, waits that take place on wide open highways, well then the waits through the easterly Chiclet-like neighborhood blocks, fully actuated traffic lights, industrial parks, double-parking, and bus stops are going to be all that much worse. When I am talking about 40 minute to 2 hour waits, I AM ROUNDING DOWN! People we are talking about a different kind of green here, dollar green.

Besides, that’s just the autocentric version of the “green” debacle. Though I am in full awareness that the people of our nation are exorbitantly far from green goals, what about those crafty, future Queens homeowners who will have participated in projects enough to completely neutralize or negate their entire carbon footprint? For every bit of gasoline they will have bought and for every molecule of pollution they will have shunted through their tailpipe, they will have also done something else on the homefront to reverse the curse. They will have planted trees and tended to flowers. They will have stuck a windmill on the roof, gone paperless with their bills. They will have taken to buying only green products, reduced, reused, recycled, minimized consumerism, ridden bikes locally, hosted Earth Day, become vegetarians, forgone AC, and donated to the DEP to clean up the East River. You mean to tell me that Inspector 12 is going to come monthly to their homes and fill out a certificate that allows them to cross that very same East River at a discount? No! “You are on four wheels and rollin’ lady, 8 bucks.” Congestion pricing has nothing to do with ecology. Were that the proposition’s only fault, it might have had a chance.

I’m going to start with the absolute broadest reason why congestion pricing is titanically unjust, the reason lawmakers need to have smacked in their faces. It punishes the people who are already doing things correctly! Congestion pricing punishes the people who are presently doing exactly what the city insists that they do to battle congestion! The city wants people to take mass transit. Well, millions of them do just that. They are on a train in a hole in the ground every morning at rush hour and again at rush hour on the way home. They stand, packed, dangerously shoulder to shoulder, not a seat in sight, clutching belongings and unable to reach the nearest pole or strap to hang onto in the speeding subway snarl. They are crowd-pressed to teeter on platform edges as the trains roll into stations, already sardine-full of people from the previous stop, each clipped for two bucks a head to experience the luxury of this risk to life and limb and time and comfort and privacy. Commuters are herded up wide staircases with nary an inch to spare between their own faces and the stranger’s ass in front of them. The sheer mass of the populous sharing their commute, the mass that is mass transit, has so engorged the subway and buses systems that, in typical New York fashion, morning rush hour is actually two and a half hours long. Nighttime rush hour lasts from 4pm to 7:30pm without blinking an eye. Six full hours per business day of people-stuffing, strained backs, picked pockets, squeezed breath, spilled drinks, no seats, danger, dehumanization, and cumulative, inadvertent dry humping; and to this equation Bloomberg wishes to ADD all the people in up to 40% of all the vehicles in Manhattan?! I guess one of us must have bent his grandmother over at Thanksgiving.

Too personal? Perhaps. I mean, the idea of congestion pricing seemed pretty damned personal to me. How about my once pregnant wife, high-risk pregnancy, weekly appointments with her OB, the occasional extra appointment for a test or two here or there? Well, we live in Queens. Her choice of doctor (and we have to add the insurance company’s choice of doctor) was in Manhattan. You mean to tell me that you think it is perfectly fine to implement a congestion pricing scheme that would leave my pregnant wife only two real transit choices for every single appointment as well as for the “big day?” Choice number one, walk eight blocks, go up the subway steps, enter the subway system, up another set of steps, onto the train, 20 minute ride with rush hour bodies knit together like a big B.O. doily, change trains underground, 10 minute ride with rush hour bodies crushed to critical and sometimes urinating mass, up another set of steps, followed by a five block walk to the hospital. Choice number two, get in the car and wait 40 minutes to 2 hours to get through an $8.00 toll, per trip, and over a bridge that without the toll can take 5 minutes? Hey, I realize it is expensive to have a baby in New York, but you just took $416 out of that baby’s mouth. If you consider the time I spend waiting each day to make it through that toll, time I could have been at work after each doctor’s appointment, well even at minimum wage that’s an additional $371.80 you’ve taken from that child’s well-being. This doesn’t even count gas spent while waiting. Might not sound like much, and therefore it might not sound too personal, but let’s keep in mind there are 125,00 babies born in New York City every year. That’s 150,000 to 275,000 pregnant commuters at any given time. There's a hearing I want to hear!

Let us, for the moment, turn to discounting some of the lesser riddles embedded with the pro-congestion pricing pulpit. How about the idea that the intention of congestion pricing was to encourage people outside of the city to take mass transit? Well, we are getting closer here, but still untrue. Placing the toll booths on the bridges smack in the middle of the city means you are not looking to curtail outside cars from entering NYC, but that you are trying to curtail any cars, including the cars belonging to your own hard-working residents, from going to one particular area (the area where most of your citizens work). Bridges, sadly, form the perfect traffic bottleneck for toll booths. It makes sense that a money-monger would WANT to put the tolls on bridges, but if one is truly to encourage “outsiders” to opt for mass transit, than the toll booths logically need to be placed on the far more voluminous inbound roads on the outskirts of one’s jurisdiction. There would have to be sudden, expensive booth eyesores placed on each Nassau County road leading into Queens, the city’s largest county. Impossible!

Instead, bridges were the target, and perhaps luckily for naysayers. See, the proposed placement of the booths couldn’t have any better illustrated all the flaws with the idea. One key argument I never heard brought up to combat congestion pricing was its effect. In effect, as a proposed method to “curtail” traffic in Manhattan by 13% to 40%, such was not a curtailing at all. It was a manner in which to EXPORT the traffic to other boroughs within the same city. Up to a Manhattan-sized 40% increase in traffic would be diverted to the local roads and neighborhoods housing the very citizens who predominantly support NYC’s central business nexus. That flat traffic increase is then additionally lumped on top of the then 40% more monstrous bottle-neck caused by the toll itself. Mosquito infestation? Blah! We’ll fix it. Send 40% of those mosquitoes to your brother’s house. It’s poor business ethic, plain and simple.

I truly thought that Bloomberg, who ran as a Republican and later changed to a more Independent approach, was a person learning lessons. If so, it might then follow that at least some of those lessons would be the lessons of history. The congestion pricing proposal for NYC flagrantly ignored so many of the lessons of history that it became quite difficult to see anything inspired in the idea.

It ignored the countless news broadcasts, two toll hikes ago in 2001, that showed New Jersey drivers furious over NYC inbound tolls going up as they commuted to work, but surprisingly showed Manhattanites who were happy as pie and grossly over-thankful for the increase, figuring the hike would keep more cars out of “their” city. It didn’t, at least not until 9 months had passed and even then to a tune of a trivial 2%. Such broadcasts overtly laid those Manhattanite desires right out for everyone to hear. Do we really think those desires faded in just five or six years? Do Manhattanites deserve special treatment over others in their own city, OUR city?

It also ignored the history of the bridges bringing the city together as a single entity, a story founded on more than just matters of transit, money, trade and traffic, but one deeply rooted in culture, immersion, freedom, and empowerment. The History Channel even ran an ironically recent special on these giant NYC bridges and how they made the city whole. Cast in the light of bridge-building past, the congestion pricing proposal cannot hope to achieve any greater reputation than that of purposeful division.

I guess it also doesn’t help that the proposal ignored years of widely publicized complaints from Triborough Bridge users. In a nutshell, users of this bridge are chiefly New York City residents who are forced to pay a toll to get both to and from work within their own home town, the folks whom I’d mentioned earlier as being charged to get into their own neighborhoods. The Triborough Bridge, a bridge with three legs (plus) that actually reaches three city destinations, while placed perfectly to service three boroughs, is also at a cross-purposed niche in the city geography. It is both near the center of the city and used as an entry point. It is controlled by The Metropolitan Transit Authority and tolled much as the New Jersey crossings are despite the fact that no end of it touches New Jersey, no end leaves NYC, and it stretches across the same river as all the free bridges. The weirdness of the Triborough’s status aside, years of complaints from commuters have yielded years of responses from city officials. For decades now the typical response had been that if Queens residents wish not to pay Triborough tolls to enter Manhattan, they already have another free alternative, the 59th Street Bridge (Queensboro Bridge). Well, that response seems to imply that if Queens residents had no alternative, the Triborough Bridge toll would be eliminated. Did I say implied? The wording of this repeatedly visited response, when stated officially, is practically a promise. Under congestion pricing, there would be no alternative. Yet, was there any provision to address this historical fact, any provision that would have city officials and the MTA make good on their promise? Nope. In fact, it is more likely the Triborough Bridge toll would need be nearly doubled to match congestion pricing on the other bridges. Voilà! Another turbulent verbal history of citizen voice verses government rationalization ignored as Bloomberg’s skirmishers beseeched Albany to pass the bill.

Perhaps the easiest reel of history for our representatives to have shelved was the common sense episode. Tolls, for the most part, are meant to help pay for new thoroughfares. They offset new bridge costs and new highway costs, ensuring that public projects eventually pay for themselves. Specifically, they are a plan to guarantee that those who foot the bill are those who use the road, and not an additional tax hike on six million people who stayed at home summer Fridays picking their toes. Sometimes, tolls are instead worked into a broader shard of the revenue system, not only paying for the road over which one travels, but additionally helping to pay for related initiatives, like transit in general, or unrelated initiatives like public schools, police protection, and the Mayor’s penis pump. In either case, there is an unavoidable chronology in the purposing of tolls. In the first case mentioned, tolls have a built-in end date. They are placed for a number of years and then removed when the road construction and maintenance costs have been superseded. New York City need only look to its near neighbor, the Southern State Parkway for this example. In the second case mentioned, tolls are placed when the road is built and are planned to remain in that location indefinitely. NYC’s other near neighbor, The New Jersey Turnpike, is a shining and despicably expensive example of this usage. However, does anyone care that in neither case is a road allowed to remain free for a century and then get tolled later on? That’s a step backwards! A twelve year old kid can tell that's a decision that moves in completely the wrong direction. This concept is consumately un-American. To find its like, one has to stretch for examples all the way across the Atlantic Ocean or into nations with whom we would never share economic policy. We are not Stockholm on the Hudson. You know, the plain common sense of it is that Manhattan traffic will not be viabley curtailed. For every vehicle you get out of the area, another one will take its place eventually, usually from within Manhattan by people living there. Where do we get off suggesting a rigid policy that even distantly approaches the ideal of, “If you want to drive here, you have to be rich...and we're willing to move backwards to enforce that?”

In the end, maybe the folks on my side in Albany had it right. Maybe all these many solid arguments were just too common, too easy to overlook as non-points and non-politics. Maybe the “race card” or the “unfair tax” approach had more on the ball than I’d realized. I mean, after all, it is one more well known lesson of history that Robert Moses, power broker who saw to the construction of the Northern and Southern State Parkways, each stretching east over Long Island from NYC, sought to prejudicially exclude. All the cross-street bridges over both parkways were purposely built too low to allow buses to pass thereunder. It was an artifice specifically employed to disallow poorer people (urban minorities) from making their way to Long Island. That’s a bit of a Berlin Wall, a kind of lowbrow force field. Well, what is Bloomberg, but a rich power broker? I personally don’t hear a speck of bigotry in his speeches. That shows he’s careful, careful enough to tailor every quip, careful enough not to use language that divides. It begs the question then, why he as such a careful, rich, power broker would elect to back a policy that so clearly lumps him into historical association with another who deliberately sought to divide, maybe even conquer. Aren’t appearances everything?

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Logic is Not the Opposite of Faith

If you’ve taken the time to spy any chunk of ideas I’ve written about, it’ll probably come as no surprise that I am very into the strictures of debate, even the lesser frequented unwritten rules of plain discussion. Yes, my wife hates me. Points of order are easy complaints for me to make, as so many believe their own utterances to be expressed in a debate-worthy fashion when, in truth, many are just blathering intellectually without any steerage. Kind of like this paragraph!

This does not mean, however, that every discussion is a formal debate or that I expect hard core forensics to be applied to a friendly, verbal tête-à-tête. Sure, it would be nice, but I cannot, myself, maintain that infinitive level of focus. (One must always leave time to watch Star Trek.) So, a number of family members have seized varying occasions to ask me, “What tactic crops up most frequently without ever actually leading to debate?” Hands down, that would be the idea that logic is the opposite of faith. It deserves debate, but persistently comes from people who don’t know how.

While no one has ever said to me, outright, that logic is the opposite of faith, the notion creeps into and through plenty of discussions as if it is a given. A completely viable thinker can stand right there, ask you your reasons, listen to the dissertation of logical proofs you offer up as the very definition of REASON itself, and then counter confidently with, “Sounds like you have to give it up to God, “ or some non-sense about the great mystery. The problem is not that folks believe in such blueprints to the universe, it is simply that they’ve impacted nothing for the sake of the discussion. They’ve neither proved nor disproved, agreed nor disagreed, helped nor hurt the conversation. They’ve made the time you’ve taken to explain yourself, time wasted. It is little different from taking a half hour to describe your ground-breaking research on Project Blue Book, by request, only to have the requester respond with, “I hear the barley crop is in for a harsh season.” You might as well have been talking to the Wailing Wall.

While I’ve no doubt that the idea of logic as the “opposite” of faith began with logicians who recognized illogic in the manners that some people had chosen to express their beliefs, this wordplay now seems to get more often insinuated into conversation by the blind believer. It is used as a tool. It is meant to puncture a hole in any logical argument regardless of the subject matter or content. It’s treated as a trump card. By claiming that logic is the opposite of faith and thereafter claiming that you are a faithful person, it gives flimsy license to simply discount everything another person has said, baselessly. Its use smacks lightly of a child in the terrible twos.

“By comparing every layer of the Earth’s crust in reverse order, taking particular note of the fossils therein, we can see the slow and gradual changes that are the hallmarks of evolution.”

“Nope.”

“If you said you were going to clean the car on Friday and thereafter promised that you were going to clean the car on Friday and then you spent Thursday through Sunday as a vomiting drunkard in Tijuana, what you told me was untrue.”

“Nope.”

I suppose it’s natural to want a universal trump card. If you believe in whatever humanly frail configuration your own personal card presents in conversation, such eliminates a lot of petty annoyance, tons of conflict, and the need for anything mentally challenging on the spot. (Please read Idiocracy.) The problem with this particular zinger, the presumption that logic is the opposite of faith, is that it is not factual. Logic is not the opposite of faith. In fact, if one is truly faithful, s/he MUST embrace logic. We’ll get to that.

Logic is not the opposite of faith for a great many reasons. Among them, this Layperson’s List:

1) There are no universal opposites.

2) Logic exists as a part of “creation” and, if God exists, logic is therefore a gift from God.

3) Logic and faith are not mutually exclusive…they overlap.


The first entry on my Layperson’s List, “there are no universal opposites,” may sound highly philosophical, (meaning, of course, boring), but in actuality it is a simple misunderstanding about how we use the concept of opposites (and yes, still boring). This “opposites” concept is generally defined as “the one thing that is most unlike a given thing,” and is tainted immature in its over-application.

I touched briefly upon this misunderstanding in my piece Fun with Stereotypes, Generalizations, and Profiling when I wrote, “Philosophy 101…Students are asked to think back to the beginnings of civilization [language] and list ideas that might have been perceived as basic, universal opposites. Inevitably, through common sense, students list right and wrong, light and dark, on and off, good and evil, man and woman, yes and no, happy and sad, and other appropriate notions. The problem with the structure of supposed universal opposites is the result. Woman is somehow placed on a list with wrong, dark, evil, no, off, and sad. This is the very tender root of association as used, even by accident, for prejudicial effect.”

The illustration is an intriguing one, mostly because reading between the lines brings something to light…antonyms are a function of language, opposites are a function of thought. Neither is a function of physical reality. You see, a man is the antonym or “opposite” of a woman in word alone, not in his physical being. This is difficult for us to accept. In plain conversation it is very easy to overlook the fact that the WORD “apple” has nothing to do with a physical apple. The WORD apple helps us communicate the IDEA of an apple, even if an apple is not present in the room to point at. Two people on the phone, one saying “apple” and one hearing “apple” both share a similar IDEA as to what the conversation is about. What they CALLED that idea, however, would never alter, impact, or otherwise affect an actual piece of fruit in a bowl. An apple, by any other name, is still whatever it is. “A rose, by any other name would smell as sweet.”

So, the WORD “man” is shown as antonym to the WORD “woman” because the language is thereby limiting the context of the communication to a DUALITY of sexes. Outside of that context (that supposed duality) might be the fact that nearly 9 percent of all newborns in the U.S.A. are born gender non-specific or the fact that “man” and “woman” are really talking about roles while “male” and “female” talk about gender. Regardless, using antonyms is a tool that limits the context to only an idealistic duality when a physical duality does not exist. Hence phrases claiming, “It’s like comparing apples to oranges,” or “What goes up, must come down.”

Let us not confuse that linguistic tool, those antonyms, those words, with limited perceptions or thoughts somehow invoking physical opposites. Let us not allow the useful existence of antonyms, antonyms that limit a context, to drive us to believe that there is never a greater context and therefore no more to understand than A is magically opposite of B.

Opposites, as a function of thought, are susceptible to all the pitfalls of subjectivity like any other idea. Hubris is one of these pitfalls, the egotistical notion that we can take a function of thought and manifest it as physical reality in order to discuss it as a fact. (Weird Science) We cannot.

See, opposites, as thoughts, are necessary. In early childhood development, the use of opposites is a teaching tool that allows us to assimilate knowledge when we are still pooping pants. Saying that one thing is MOST unlike another thing teaches us how to reason. It teaches us how to recognize differences and eventually how to assimilate and to categorize those differences. An infant might learn to recognize a cartoon picture of a dog as a dog, but then most immediately calls anything with four legs and a tail a dog. By staying on and teaching the child that the cartoon on the next page is NOT a dog, but a cat, the baby eventually recognizes those differences and can pick between both animals. As well, those two images are so basic in the U.S.A., that the child somehow learns that a dog is the opposite of a cat. That’s great for learning, but we forget once older that, in fact, a dog is not the opposite of a cat. If “opposite” is tasked to be the object most unlike the given, well doesn’t a cat have a lot more in common with a dog than, say, a Twinkie or deep space or anti-matter? Who is to say which thing is truly MOST UNLIKE another? In the same way, “day” has more in common with “night” than it does with a bologna sandwich, “up” more in common with “down” than with pencil shavings, and “order” more in common with “chaos” than a fictional character in an unpublished manuscript who has a propensity for wearing chaps.

“Opposite” is a reasoning tool. It allows us to visualize one thing, and then, with no further input, visualize a new idea perceivably 180 degrees out from the original. We then label that second idea with a name. Anti-Christ, Bizarro, Evil Spock, they are all anthropomorphizations of this mental practice. They amuse us. “Dude, those jeans have so many holes in them, they’re like the anti-pants!” Meanwhile, our amusements overlook the same practice in everyday conversation.

“Unnatural” sounds like an opposite, it sounds like anything “not natural,” but then what is “supernatural” and how does it play into the relationship of such ideas? “Abnormal” sounds like anything “not normal” and then has the same problem with the concept of “paranormal.” If “alive” is truly the opposite of “dead,” then how can we even conceptualize fictions dealing with the “undead” or loosely related existential matters? If “love” is the true opposite of “hate,” bereft of any similarity or convergence, then a “love/hate” relationship could never exist, except among the happily schizophrenic. Come on people, pencil is not the opposite of pen, pencil is not the opposite of paper, pencil is not the opposite of eraser. If a pencil could exhibit some physical property defining it as opposite to any of these three, we could never discuss the remaining two in an “opposites” context without getting tossed in a loony bin. Yet we do discuss them. We discuss all three. Almost everybody has used pencil as the opposite of all three of these in discussion. Such proves that the practice is dependent upon shifting ideas, momentary opinions, convenient retorts, a simple call to meet an isolated conversation’s need. The practice is not, and will NEVER be what many speakers claim. They claim the “opposite” attribute to be a self-evident truth, a physical reality, a given, and state that they are merely acknowledging that “fact” before spurring the conversation on. Wrong! That’s faulty foundation.

Opposites, as tools, have their place in helping us make a point, but they are never a given nor the point themselves. We build our point in conversation the way we built our mental prowess from those early childhood beginnings and so it is no wonder that opposites are part of byplay. However, they cannot be the result of that disagreement, only one tool in arriving there. I can easily say, “The rough draft of your essay was INCOMPREHINSIBLE,” in order to illustrate through hyperbola how poorly a piece has been put together. Yet, as bad as that piece may be, “incomprehensible” is a stretch. Incomprehensibility would more literally dictate that it was in code, in alien symbols and, perhaps, somehow written fourth dimensionally. The opposite of comprehensible is used for the sake of exaggeration. Notice, though, that this could not be the point of the conversation. You should never hear a speech leading up to, “In conclusion, your essay is incomprehensible,” unless, of course, the essay IS written in code, in alien symbols, and somehow fourth dimensionally. The real life conclusion will always be something other than that. It will be, “So, I insist that you write this again,” or, “So, you’ve failed the assignment,” or, “You are going to have to look for a literary agent with a death wish before you can get this published!” There is no closure in a debate that ends on a note of opposites as absolute.

Heady? Yes, perhaps. Still, that’s a veritable litany of reasons as to why opposites of any kind are a misused construct in conversation. Opposites falsely group terms together that do not belong (i.e. women and evil). Opposites are treated as antonyms with no limit to context, a backwards process that attempts to take a word’s functional status and force it into being a physical reality. Opposites are a teaching tool for immature minds, one that must be outgrown if one is to partake in adult conversation. And, in the end, opposites are never the point, never the conclusion.

These misuses in our generation are taking place in countless households to innumerable volumes. How often have you heard assertions like,

“That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever,”

followed by,

“You’re wrong! It makes complete sense!”

We’ll call these speakers Phil and Norma, respectively. Their tiff is just one example that simultaneously fails multiple rigors of debate as well as the intent of plain discussion to reach agreement, all through simple misuse of an opposite.

First, Norma’s retort presumes itself to be the point, as if just mentioning an opposite wins an argument. It does not. Whatever the point is, Norma has clearly missed it.

Second, though the two statements seem related because they use similar words, Norma has actually gone completely off-topic. When Phil presents the subject matter as a flawed train-of-thought, that suspect repartee is now the pith of the disagreement, the new content. Norma is beholden to address the subject matter directly. Instead, in this case, Norma says the one thing she anticipates will allow her to AVOID addressing any part of the statement. It’s not unlike Ann asking what Tully’s financial plan is to pay off credit card debt and Tully responding with, “I see no reason to help pay down our debt when you refuse to cook dinner all the time.” Sorry Tully. We are linear beings. We are subject to a force of nature called chronology. Ann asked her question first and deserves to have it addressed first. Phil brought the suspect train-of-thought to light first and deserves to have it addressed by Norma immediately thereafter. Save the other things you wish to discuss for later. The other things may be valid concerns, but they are not valid arguments when unrelated to the most immediate topic.

Third, there’s more to life, more to this context, than a perfect duality of sense and nonsense. These are antonyms, not universal opposites. As illustrated before, “sense” has more in common with “nonsense” than it does with marzipan or the voice-over direction in FernGully. Logical sense exists. Philosophical sense exists. We all know the literary dichotomy struck between sense and sensibility. Emotions are a part of making sense of things. Cultural differences lend interpretation to sense. Ethic is a biting factor in sense. Thomas Paine separated out common sense from all other sense. Sense has components, layers. Therefore, when Phil claims that something does not make sense, it is a call for Norma to compile all such applicable building blocks to restate and to support her premise. He demands explanation. It’s a dare of sorts, knowing that if Norma cannot, she fails her point. Well, stating an opposite does none of this. It’s just as much a failure as if Norma had clammed up and said nothing. In fact it is additionally a failure in that she’s both failed her point and falsely presumed that somehow she made a valid one. Enacting this assumed reversal is actually less meaningful than if she’d said nothing. You go girl!

So, logic and faith cannot fit some conversational mold as universal opposites simply because universal opposites do not exist. Even if one wishes to compare them via this structure, one is attacking the issue from a very childlike standpoint. That might be useful to start a dialogue, feel out your listener, but if you do not therein elevate the discussion by more mature means you are simply taking the standpoint of a mentally challenged four year old. A more mature debater would realize that a more proper antonym to logic is illogic. A more proper antonym to faith is skepticism. If logic and faith are polar concepts, then their antonyms should be as well. Yet, skepticism and illogic are not treated in this way. Skeptics can be logical and can be illogical. Persons failing logic can be secular skeptics and can be faith-driven. Skepticism and illogic overlap. They meet up in areas and remain apart in others. Therefore, if the antonyms are not polar, the chosen words are not polar, not opposites.

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The number two item on the Layperson’s List of reasons that logic is not the opposite of faith reads, “Logic exists as a part of ‘creation’ and, if God exists, logic is therefore a gift from God.”

I’ve always taken great offense at the implication that my simple ability to add five plus five is somehow directly influenced by Satan. “The heresy of numeracy!” Again, nobody ever actually picketed my calculus class nor did the devil himself ever bubble up in a fiery din whilst I hashed out a neat little truth table. It does seem, however, that when one gets on the specific subject of faith one is frequently asked to completely forego math, physics, and any critical reasoning skill in order to accept what another person shares at face value. It seems I am frequently put in the position of being asked, advised, or ordered to “let go.” There is merit in the act of “letting go” of course, but I am specifically talking about those who ask me to “let go” of cold, hard facts. Are not those cold, hard facts also a part of the existence in existentialism, part of the pattern in the multiverse that God designed? If I can do as you ask and let go of all quantum principal in order to understand your take on God, cannot you let go of religious staples in order to discuss another possibility? Letting go is meant to be applied to uninformed opinions. Letting go helps shed material possessions toward a happier, Walden life. It removes anger. It helps us move beyond the loss of a loved one or get over a substance addiction (in my case, bad tacos). It helps us accept defeat in order to fight again another day. Letting go is at one time a coping skill, a metaphysical practice, the foundation of peace, a test of maturity, a facing of fears, strength, and yes, a leap of faith. Given all its many flavors, it is even easy to understand why so many folks swear by it to such an exclusive degree. After all, in practice, the technique is said to lead one to realize just how things matter, how ideas stack up. Why is it, then, that “letting go” is so frequently used to inform me of what supposedly doesn’t matter. Happiness matters. Coping matters. Maturity matters. Faith matters. However things stack, doesn’t that mean that math matters and logic matters and the process of elimination matters? Yet, the clockwork of so many orations urges me to reject curtain number one in order to choose between curtains two and three. Hello? Monty? I’m willing to take that journey with you, but tell me why first. Presume you know something I don’t. Presume God has spoken to you directly and that you are strapped with the burden of explaining that wonder to a person completely out-of-the-know. You are going to have to start the explanation speaking in my terms in order that I should understand and come to share that newer knowledge with you. This means telling me why curtain number one (logic) is off-limits BEFORE we can go any further. “Letting go” CAN be alternatively accomplished by thoroughly accounting for the ideas that are to be rejected. I need not come to spiritual balance ONLY through leaps of faith. Perhaps I want my faith to be an informed one. If there is such a higher view to be achieved, one drawn from omnipotence or everpresence, its truth will reverberate down into the “lesser” things of this world and thereby make valid my desire to discuss them, negating your desire to ignore them.

Still, the offense I’ve taken in this radical supposition that my yearning for checkmate is a call to Beelzebub, doesn’t actually come from ridiculous notions like Satan loves Texas Instruments. My consternation more readily hails from the fact that this assertion discounts God’s presence, usually a discounting by the God believer. Given my values, folks may find it hard to swallow that I do believe in God. I MIGHT even go so far as to say that, while logically, I have no idea what that God looks like, how s/he is to be treated, or what form our interrelationship is supposed to take, there is the remote possibility (one in infinity) that the body of religious philosophies presented us might accidentally be correct, or might accidentally have one passage or two that is correct. I’m insulted by the hypocrisy in the assertion, not the assertion itself. If Satan wants to live in my underwear drawer, let him. It’ll make my life a hell of a lot more interesting than anyone else’s. But don’t come to me and tell me that God made [hu]man in his own image while part of that image, the basic ability to reason, is concurrently suspect. Don’t present reason, even reason used to discount the existence of any god, as a temptation outside of the body that need not be experienced. In order to conceptualize, to “know of” a god at all, one requires the basic ability to reason. Reason is not a choice. Reason is part of the definition of that “image,” it is plainly what separates humans from animals. It is a part of me to no more varying degree of difference than my leg, my arm, my personality, or my capacity for love…all treated as divine gifts by the way. If there is a God, s/he would WANT me to use my logic, WANT me to take full advantage of my divine gifts. Logic, and the mathematics it spawns, are not a work of the devil. To say so is to disavow the god who "sent" you.

Some very basic examination backs this up. By claiming that my logical discourse in debating you is some temptation from Satan or from tricky free-will in a materialistic world, you are submitting that logic is not part of the divine image in which you assert me to have been made. Therefore, either God did not have logic to give or God had it and purposely withheld it. Let’s examine those two possibilities while you try to convince me to “let go” of reason.

If s/he divinely withheld logic, then I do not have it and therefore you cannot ask me to forego it or let it go. I cannot let go of something I do not possess in the first place. My statements would be no more or less important than yours and must then be treated as such without subtraction. Further if s/he again divinely withheld it, then if I obtain it and use it, I am being Godly or God-like and you shant argue with me. Kowtow.

On the other hand, if God didn’t have logic to give, then s/he is completely illogical. This would be a very ironic construct, given that we usually attribute a massively chaotic state to hell and not heavenly dwellings. Irony aside, an illogical being defies explanation. You would have no way to discuss such an entity, no way to sell it. You’d have nothing to say. Whatever words in whatever order you’d attribute the attempt to illuminate the listener would be words classified as incorrect before even leaving your mouth. Essentially, this scenario beckons you to stuff a sock in it and shut the heaven up!

Well, religiously faithful persons cite neither of these scenarios. They do not refrain from speaking on the subject and do not treat my conversation as God-like. They do not present God as illogical nor treat my argument as equal to their own. So, in these practices, they are acknowledging logic as part of their definition of the divine. They must accept my grounds AND use similar anglings to justify their own beliefs. To be truly faithful, one must embrace logic.

All tolled, whatever shape the possibility of a divine plane or omnipotent entity might take, logic is going to be a part of it, a building block, a theme. With those kinds of pillars shoring up the vastness of creation, humans partaking in logic would be partaking in something far larger than the self, far larger than even all perceived reality and imagination. Humans exercising logic in a simple, every day conversation would be echoing a key element that permeates all which lies behind the veil of this world and the next and the next and the next. Mind you, a great many other human actions would likely also be a part of this theme. Emotion, life force, honor, valor, deeds, work, originality, talent, name your pick. I can easily make the same claim about almost anything people put on a pedestal. The point is not to escalate logic to some tensile strength that girds the structure of the unknown, but to say that it is undoubtedly one of the contoured chits in the jigsaw. We cannot aggrandize select divine morsels while sacking their counterparts.

Look, Jesus knew and used math. He didn’t just have some rudimentary understanding of math that might barely rival my computer illiterate father trying desperately to buy a broken Swatch on eBay. He was a carpenter. He lived with the complexities of practical math in the forefront of his mind, at the tip of his tongue and writ with his own meaty hand every single day. Wood was an enormous commodity. Math assured one that s/he got the designs correct prior to the first cut. Math would have been a large portion of his conversations and therefore his relationship with his “Earthly” father. Sure, if Jesus was somehow God or son of God or prophet of God, he may have known way back then the deepest fractal anomalies and cosmic string proofs. Putting together a goofy goat yoke for his neighbor wouldn’t have been much of a challenge. Yet, he didn’t miracle his wares into being. Poof! A quilt rack! Poof! A scroll shelf! If he did, we would have certainly read about it in Crap Not Edited from the Bible Weekly. He built them with bare hands and used plain logic to do it. If he didn’t exist, he didn’t exist. If he was just a guy, he was just a guy. But, if he was God, it is important to take note that he didn’t forego the math. He didn’t treat simple, human logic as something beneath him. He used it. He partook and did so in the positive. He achieved with it, worked with it, and to a certain degree exhibited faith in it. Jesus could be completely made up, but employing logic would still be a Christ-like endeavor.

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This brings us to the last entry on our Layperson’s List of why logic is not the opposite of faith, one that was described as “Logic and faith are not mutually exclusive…they overlap.”

Sum up all known logic, if you will, to be represented by a circle. Do the same, then, with faith. Draw it out, if it helps, just two circles on a piece of paper. Now, how do you place those circles, those rings on a page? If you are asserting that logic and faith are opposites, and you are my four year old nephew, you’d probably place them at the farthest corners from each other, never to intersect.

Or, perhaps, if you eat organic consume and wear a dress made of hemp you’d draw one ring on one side of your paper and another ring on the “back.”

A few Real Genius Lazlos will make two separate pieces of paper and rush them via AMC Pacer to trash receptacles in New York and L.A.

And, there’s always the defeatist simpleton on a high horse, usually with a three times life size bust of Heidegger mounted over his bed, who will simply refuse to draw either circle, claiming that sketching them out implies a relationship between the two and since they are “opposites” they have absolutely no relationship. Wow, kids! Isn’t drawing fun? Mmmmmm, glue.

Regardless of how lofty an approach one takes in this penciled exercise, illustrating how s/he perceives logic and faith to be opposites, the results are all the same. Each of these examples overtly claims that the sketcher cannot think of, cite, or even imagine a single, solitary instance in all of life and creation wherein logic and faith might conjoin. See, the crux here is not whether logic and faith as nouns ever truly overlay, one on the other, but rather the implication that the asserting individual cannot even THINK of a way in which the two MIGHT sync up. Ergo, if I CAN think of one way they might, and you cannot, I know more about them than you do and you must take the subservient position of the novice in the debate. If I can think of two ways they might overlap, your backseat would be all the more necessary. If I can think of one or two ways they DO sync up, that’s even deeper a reflection of my superior knowledge, etc. You can draw circles until you are blue in the face, plotting them out on all sorts of pages forcing them as far apart as you wish. You are simply making a model of your belief. What you fail to realize, however, is the brittleness of that model, the sheer fragility of that particular belief. It’s a belief, as represented on paper, that is so fragile, I do not need a proof to discount it. I need no facts, no studies, no surveys. I need no experts, no philosophers, no clerics. All I need to completely shatter that particular assertion is to MAKE-UP a single way in which logic and faith MIGHT be concurrent, and your models are completely defunct, confuted. Put simply, I can visualize all of your options….plus one.

I can perceive logic and faith to be at least this…

…if not this

… if not every permutation of this.

If you cannot perceive it, you know less and I win. If you can perceive it, even just after I show it to you for the first time, you acknowledge instances in which the two can overlap, thereby disacknowledging the assertion that the two are opposites at all.


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So, to recap, there are no universal opposites. Do not claim, then, that logic and faith are opposites and treat your claim as a given, unless you’re bucking for village idiot.

Logic is a part of creation, and if you believe creation to be supernaturally sourced, then logic, like faith, is an important measure in understanding that supernature. It should be given quarter in all discussions on faith, lest you soundeth quite dumb.

Logic and faith are not islands. No more can you separate out logic from faith than you can faith from the many facets of living you wish it to guide. They interrelate. They cross-compliment. You may choose to pick portions of each realm which do not overlap for the sake of discussion, but by all means do not fail to acknowledge the other manners in which they do, or you go to the grave as blank as you came from the womb.

For my part, logic is not meant to explain the unknown. Rather it is used to explain the newly known. Faith, by comparison, is meant to carry through an element of truth uttered in something very old and make it applicable present day. As systems of thought, perhaps even as aspects of the human soul, these two foci are too often pit against one another in discussion, presumed at cross-purposes and treated like weapons. Instead, I feel they are each a differently functional environment in which to conduct that discussion and that the participants must respect those environments, sometimes simultaneously, or perish. Personally, if logic were the mountains and faith the plains, I’d simply want to camp in the hills. It would be so much more interesting there.

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No Cuss, No Muss

Yep, while our backs were turned, feverishly reading my ever thought-provoking piece, Bar None, on the proposal to ban cussing in bars in St. Louis...South Pasadena, California snuck in like a cat burgling rapist and officially declared an annual "No Cussing Week."

AP Article via MSNBC

My conclusion, as before, Pasadena, California is now off of my tourism list. In fact, since the town went the step further to actually implement the idea, I may have to take a step further and march a million people to the Rose Bowl parade to scream out FUCK in unison every ten seconds, just for families and cameras.

Unlike the St. Louis idea, I don't read any criminality in Mayor Michael Cacciotti's move. The official week reads more like a Breast Cancer Awareness Day or a Great American Smoke Out. In a way, that might be considered endearing to have promoted civil discourse on an official level. However, it is again the subtractive phrasing of the observance that represents the slippery slope to free speech issues. "No Cussing Week" could have just as easily been called Professional Speech Day or Expansive Language Awareness Month, Pride in Our Civility Celebration or Champions of Maturity Week. With these titles you can build projects at school. Grammar assignments can turn into forensic debates, words-of-the-day contests can be implemented and involve speech games and communications fairs. The point is that recognizing the power of the English, verbal form in a positive light gives one something substantial with which to work. The possibilities, following a positive name, become as boundless as the imaginations of the program's willing participants. All a "No Cussing Week" offers is the restriction, "don't cuss."

I'm not splitting hairs here. To the reader, what the week is called might seem irrelevant. Few may care about the subtractive verses the proactive. Still, the subject at hand is one that deals with LANGUAGE, speech specifically, and therefore should have had consideration toward the language used to promote it. My complaint is a direct outgrowth of that content. The Mayor's people should have considered that the simple function of a negative phraseology on a speech driven initiative is a tool others use to try to undermine free speech. A "No Cussing Week" can easily lead to "no cussing laws," or "no cussing zones," or "no cussing in film." I mean, can we not see a correlation, extreme though it may be, between a "No Cussing Week" and a town-sanctioned book burning? Far fetched? One modern society did it. How are we immune from repeating those mistakes?

Don't take my alarmist word for it. Right in the MSNBC article it already goes beyond the intent of the official week and speaks of "no cussing" as one day becoming a "quality of life issue." That is so short-sighted. The Pasadena week just got approved and already the foul tool is working its dark function. I guarantee there is no family living in a slum with cracked windows, roaches, heat turned off in winter, hungry kids, and zero health coverage that would consider a cuss free environment an improvement on their day.

Not enough? The 14 year-old that started the club, perhaps even a grass roots movement, is quoted as saying, "I don't cuss...If you want to hang out with me, you don't cuss." It's a line in the sand. It's exclusionary. For instance, I don't drink alcohol, but I wouldn't ask others not to drink around me and I would never, ever imply that failure to refrain as I refrain carries with it some sort of punishment, even the simple penalty of depriving others my invited company. This is what happens when you let a 14 year old determine political policy. The kid had a great idea. He showed awesome initiative and objective. He displayed bravery and exemplified the gut American notion that one person, even a kid, can make a difference. I don't expect a 14 year old to grasp the nuances betwixt the subtractive and the proactive. I do, however, expect the full-grown, mature adults in any mayor's office to understand this and to act accordingly. Their mistake came in taking the idea of a 14 year old and implementing it unrevised, untempered with maturity or wisdom.

Inherently, days, weeks, and months made into official declarations of practice or awareness need to do so in the positive. Black History Month doesn't mean that you need to refrain from knowing other ethnically grouped accomplishments, or trickier, refrain from being a skin color. The Great American Smoke Out is called such for a reason. "Don't Smoke Week" might get some poor schmuck with a Marlboro stoned to death in line to see 10,000 B.C. Bring Your Daughter To Work Day would not work if it were called Ignore Children With Penises Day. I jest, but the philosophy persists into every facet of governing, including many far more important than Secretary's Day or Groundhog Day.

For instance, is it any wonder that of all amendments to the U.S. Constitution, the only one that "failed" or required correction was prohibition? Amendments are used to enforce rights, to acknowledge rights newly realized or admitted at the highest levels of leadership. Prohibition instead tried to take away, not to grant. It tried to limit, to control, to have people refrain from. At its heart, it failed because its attempt ran counter-directional to the purpose of a constitutional amendment. It's why I know that a proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution preventing same sex marriage would never pass or last long. It too would run counter-directional to the purpose of ENFORCING rights or ACKNOWLEDING rights.

In short, LAWS are meant to prevent, to have folks refrain from well defined practices we as a society view as bad. They operate in the negative as counteragents to those who'd squelch life, liberty, happiness, and free market. That is the function of a law. Hence, nobody can open up an idea in the negative and sanction it officially without also opening the door to that notion one day becoming a law. The two practices are of the same grain. People who do so, even unintentionally, have their hand tipped. What they are saying may sound like a decent and feel-good proposition that everyone can agree upon. Yet, they are bluffing. If what they had at heart was in any way positive or feel-good, they shant have skewed negative in its expression. They shant have opened that dangerous, dangerous door. For what it's worth, with all our millions of laws on the books, chances are (barring new technological innovation) that everything that requires prevention already has a law against it. Logically then, pretty much anything that's existed for 200+ American years which does not have a law against it, most likely should not. It should remain in that grey area between controversy and blind acceptance that teaches us all how to get along and how to see alternate points of view. We are not just agreeing upon these measures as an existent society in 2008, but as a civic society in the broader sense that includes all American citizens from 1787 until now...possibly even into the future.

This was the vision of our founding fathers. They knew that the pursuit of people driven government and equality would rest upon a body of laws enacted by said people, specifically so that no one person with a myopic mindset could seek office to screw it up. They acknowledged that volumes and volumes of laws might be created in this pursuit and made room for that to be okay. Yet, at the same time, they created a structure and a list. No matter how many preventive laws might ever come to be in their future, every single one of them would be held accountable to, held subjective to this pervading structure and to this pervading list of acknowledged rights. The ability to prevent, to exclude from freedom, would forever be measured against this higher purpose, this documented inclusion or admission into American freedom. The negative would be governed by the positive.

“No Cussing Week” sounds pretty good. It’s not unlike a makeshift Lenten practice or a really good diet. I bet nobody ever explained to the youth that, phrased as such, it is also unconstitutional. Implemented officially, it is therefore a cause for concern. It means there is another upwardly mobile politician holding office in the U.S. who would forego the U.S. Constitution for either his own purposes or for lack of the two seconds of concentration it would take to change the name. His most likely accidental blight on our nation’s governing structure and on our rights masquerades under the guise of ceremony, holiday. If that’s to persist unchecked, why not KKK Appreciation Day? Open a present, burn a cross. Why not a Torturegiving holiday? Turkey, stuffing, and water boarding while we watch a parade.

Look, there are plenty of reasons not to cuss. Variant ethics aside, I like to refrain from cussing as often as possible because I think it means that much more when I do choose a cuss word in the craft of writing.

Refraining from cussing on the regular is also an exercise that elevates intelligence. One stretches the mind by always searching for alternative expressions to aptly describe anger or dismay, sort of the way an improvisational artist, while near boundless in presentation style, can keep a performance PG-13. It’s her/his boundaries that create the intellectual challenge until such time s/he would again artistically choose to reintroduce the blue language.

It almost goes without saying, even in a post-industrial, psychology-aware nation, that cussing in marriage is antithetical to what both people wish to achieve via marriage. Cussing interrupts real communication and thus partnership and slows the journey to common goals with innumerable, needless pauses to marital momentum.

Perhaps refraining from cussing can be used as a tool to set examples for young children, new comedians, etc. We all do it. Nobody would cuss in a job interview or a convent. We have no problem choosing alternative wording and tone when running for office, broadcasting news, or critiquing literature. There is a merit to practicing language in the subtractive from time to time, circumstance to circumstance. It’s a type of extra-sensory deprivation that achieves particularly coveted intellectual results.

However, theoretically that merit cannot be achieved if not for the greater prevalence of the explicative in common usage. A metaphor…the viceroy butterfly. The viceroy butterfly looks exactly like the more prevalent monarch butterfly and is named accordingly. The monarch butterfly is poisonous to birds. Birds have evolved to “recognize” monarch butterflies by sight alone and therefore steer far clear of them as food. The viceroy butterfly contains no such poison, but has instead evolved to look like the monarch butterfly as a form of defense against being eaten by birds. It’s an amazing interrelationship that deepens our understanding of the evolutionary process. Yet, as with all evolution, a delicate balance had to be struck and maintained for us to not yet see further changes in the viceroy. Meaning, the viceroy population must always remain in the minority to the monarch for the subterfuge to work. Once the viceroy might gain numbers over the monarch, the odds of a bird grabbing a poisonous insect go down. Without knowing an iota of math, birds would slowly begin partaking of the food again when fewer resources exist and fewer of their own kind die off in turn. In fact, to exist, the viceroy must always be limited in numbers as compared to a completely different species. Guess what, they don’t know math either.

The same holds true when we examine the relationship between the merits of not cussing and the pathology of cussing itself. The countless merits there are to be found, several of them enlightening in nature, cannot be achieved if there is nothing more common to refrain from. Challenging one’s self to use language empty of swearing would fail to be a challenge unless swearing itself not only existed, but existed to a far larger degree than the unique, individual choice to refrain from it. Cussing, like any other word or word group, MUST be far more commonplace in raw numbers than the personal choice to refrain from it in order for us to procure virtue in the attempt to subvert it. We can neither alleviate the need for the one nor the practice of the other without denying ourselves the rewards to be culled in the contrast. Picture it. How much more expansive would your vocabulary and your speech become if you honestly attempted to refrain from using the word “the” for a year. That would be quite the journey. “The” is throughout common usage in numbers too great to count. Your attempt to the contrary would be a grand challenge with who knows how many intellectual and disserting rewards? Now picture trying, instead, to refrain from using the word “otolaryngology” for a year. It would be far less of a challenge specifically because it is nowhere near as common in usage as “the.” Its raw numbers pale in comparison. Less of a challenge means less of a mental journey, less of an intellectual reward. In a Cartesian sense, we require vast platitudes in mere order to doubt them properly or advantageously.

Mr. Mayor, my fangs would retract if only you’d positively alter the name of your newfound, annual observance. Until then, in my mind, I have to question what you understand about this democratic Republic. Your intentions seem honorable, but your fitness to govern, suspect. It’s like when Katie Couric called freedom of speech a “privilege” or when former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer claimed people should “watch what they say” in response to Bill Maher’s firing from ABC. I’ll give you that cussing can be viewed as bad. However, to whatever degree it might be bad, your official “NO” week is far worse.

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