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Sidewalk hogs are symptom of greater ills

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By TOM JACKSON

Published: October 7, 2009

Where and how folks park their vehicles generally ranks toward the bottom of any serious list of Truly Great Concerns. Deservedly so.

But just as a splinter lodged between the second and third knuckles of your index finger hardly amounts to a genuine medical crisis, once the sliver has penetrated your skin, until it is excised, you can scarcely think of anything else.

So it is in the neighborhoods across unincorporated Pasco County where all manner of motor vehicles are left to intrude on sidewalks, causing, at least, inconvenience and bitter sentiments - if not open revolt on behalf of a mystery caravan of wheelchair travelers.

The transgressions have been sufficiently numerous and the ire sufficiently hot to have attracted the attention of your county commissioners, who addressed the situation at Tuesday's board meeting, attended by predictable eye-rolling among cynics whose insights were captured by an anonymous poster at TBO.com:

"Wow, commissioners have" (wait for it) "nothing better to worry about?"

And there it is: the obligatory sniffle of the self-righteous scold.

What would Mom think?

Of course commissioners have "better" things to worry about, just as a man with a heart condition and an overdrawn bank account has more to worry about than tweezing the aforementioned splinter from between the second and third knuckles of his index finger.

But it turns out that there still will be people upset about proposed paving assessments and fire crews running short-handed and alarming levels of idled workers, and those conditions will neither be solved nor exacerbated by board members sacrificing an hour or so to the cause of saving Pasco's neighborhoods from sidewalk hogs.

Sometimes the not-so-important things are the things you have to do. Especially now, when so many of us are content to inconvenience others so as not to inconvenience ourselves.

We blow through red lights. We abandon shopping carts in the middle of parking spaces. We show up late. We don't RSVP. We don't bus our tables at the food court. Our idea of a cogent argument is calling the other guy bad names.

Rather than acknowledge that maybe we screwed up, we blame others. It's the builder's fault that my driveway's too short. It's the city's fault the yellow light doesn't last longer.

Dial back your presumptions

Suddenly, everybody has a rant; everybody has a claim; everybody has an excuse. This just in: Festering rudeness metastasizes. Coarseness breeds crudeness. Don't look so surprised.

Sometimes, laws can be - must be - created to rein in our smug intrusions. Docking persistent sidewalk hogs $30 an episode could create plenty of uncluttered rights of way and dial back neighborhood tension.

Keyword: The Jax Files, for Tom Jackson's bonus insights.

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