I went to\u00a0the Saint Paul City Hall\u00a0– the museum of all that was spectacular about institution art-deco in downtown Saint Paul – the other day.<\/p>\n
Now, as always when I go to City Hall, I make a religious point of leaving every <\/em>piece of metal in my car – coins, cell phones, everything<\/em>.<\/p>\n Naturally, the metal detector picked up something<\/em> – the shoelace eyes on my shoes, in this case.\u00a0 It always does, with everyone that tries to go to the courthouse.\u00a0 Every time.<\/p>\n And so the sullen, cranky security guard (there is no other kind working at City Hall) made me, like everyone else that tries to go into the building, stand aside and hold out my arms and turn around, waving the little wand around until he ascertained that, yes, it was just the shoelace eyes.\u00a0 As usual.\u00a0 As with everyone <\/em>who ever <\/em>goes into the damned building.<\/p>\n It’s to the point where it’s not an exercise in security; it’s a little ritual the city, like every body of government that surrounds itself with this kind of “security”, does to show you, the citizen who’s boss.\u00a0 “We can make you empty your pockets for our inspection, and make you stand in awkward positions and twirl on command, and if you don’t, Deputy Friendly will haul your ass to jail for “disturbing the peace” if he’s in a good mood and “making terroristic threats” if he’s not, so behave <\/em>if you want to talk with your government masters, mere peasant”.<\/p>\n And it occurred to me – in an era when government is already out of touch with the citizens, and getting worse every day (because the agents of Hope and Change can’t be bothered by the hoi-polloi<\/em>) – that there would be one great way to make government smaller, more sensitive to the people, and more responsive.<\/p>\n Remove the metal detectors.<\/p>\n Lose the security guards.<\/p>\n Let our city bureaucrats and elected officials know that when they make decisions that affect people, they are going to have to talk with them sooner or later, and they’re going to have to mind their manners, knowing that if someone gets out of hand, they’ll have the same recourse all of us taxpaying citizens have; call the police, and wait.<\/p>\n Carry this all the way up to the state and federal levels, too.\u00a0 Perhaps if legislators, executives and employees had to handle “irate customers” the same way the kid at the counter at Wendy’s does, we wouldn’t need term limits.<\/p>\n Beat in mind, I don’t want any nuts to actually do anything<\/em> to government officials or workers.\u00a0 I mean, as long as we’re talking hypothetically, here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I went to\u00a0the Saint Paul City Hall\u00a0– the museum of all that was spectacular about institution art-deco in downtown Saint Paul – the other day. Now, as always when I go to City Hall, I make a religious point of leaving every piece of metal in my car – coins, cell phones, everything. Naturally, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mitch"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5237"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5237\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}