(New York and Ferguson protesters tie up morning rush hour on the roadways in and around Washington. (Twitter photo by @NikkiBurdine)).

I was listening to the radio yesterday afternoon- news and traffic on the eights and “as it happens-“ and discovered that demonstrators had blocked the 14th Street Bridge. I shivered with delight that I was not trying to get back from downtown, as I did when I worked at the Hubert Humphrey Building on Constitution, or at The Bus Station on New York Avenue.

Mom used to tell me not to live on the wrong side of a bridge from where you worked; I assume she gained her experience living in Brooklyn and working in the soaring majesty of the Chrysler Building in Mid-town Manhattan.

Or maybe it was the Bellaire Bridge when she was a girl down in the Ohio Valley, though I am not aware of anything she had to do in Benwood, WVA, across the big brown river. The span has been closed for a long time, anyway, even if they have not quite got around to demolishing the thing.

The demonstrators got my attention because my former company had sought my assistance in delivering a proposal to my old customer over at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling, the combination of the former Air Force and Navy installations on the wrong side of the Anacostia River.

Naturally, the demonstrators chose the Potomac Bridge. No one would want to stop anyone from going to Anacostia, the poorest and most bedraggled portion of the District of Columbia.

The strategy, this time around, is to close major highways. The protestors have targeted LA and New York. The blockage here was new, and the first direct action following the non-indictments of law enforcement officers by the Grand Juries in Ferguson, MO, and New York.

I have stayed away from comment on both of those killings, and I am going to stay away. Mike Brown was one sort of person, and Eric Garner was another. Eric had around thirty arrests on his record, and apparently this latest one was for the serious crime of selling loose cigarettes, a misdemeanor crime.

It is symptomatic of our increasingly dysfunctional society that the laws and regulations continue to spew out of national, State and Local entities. I remember the contention by author Harvey Silvergate in his book “Three Felonies a Day” about the number of Federal crimes we likely commit each day without even being aware of it.

Modern federal criminal laws have mushroomed, and they have additionally become impossibly broad and vague. Which is to say, just about all of us could be rousted by the Feds at any time and ruined, even we were innocent in intent and just clueless. I won’t bother you details, but just recently there was a minor furor about people who deposited cash in their bank accounts. The Feds decided that was prima facie evidence of illegal activity and confiscated the contents of people’s bank accounts without legal recourse.

And that is just for having cash. When I am going to commit a crime, I would like to be able to enjoy it, not be surprised, you know?

So there is that to be concerned about, and the reason that I was worried about the protesters who were not going to be arrested for screwing around with tens of thousands of their fellow citizens. This prosecutorial discretion thing is kind of confusing. In fact, the imposition of the law based on how someone feels about you is downright irritating.

You might have heard me fulminate about the traffic in Washington, which is perilous even in the best of conditions, much less having someone deliberately screwing around with it.

I have to confess that I have become spoiled after living and working in Arlington for the last eight years. The gridlock and paralysis that plague so many commuters, the members of the Government Clerisy Class, has not been a factor. But it was going to be factor this morning when my eyes cracked open around three AM.

Suppose there were demonstrators lying down and drawing chalk outlines around themselves on all the eastbound lanes of I-395 into the District? I had agreed to deliver the package for purely financial reasons- the holidays are coming up, after all, and since getting laid off from a full-time job and losing vacation and health care benefits.

The idea that I would wind up trapped on the bridge, no way forward or back, with the clock ticking toward the deadline at ten o’clock filled me with dread. Not to mention the consequences of failing to deliver the proposal which had involved dozens of people over the last six or seven months.

So, I was out the door at 0538, thinking that no crypto-anarchist worth his or her salt was going to be lying down on the pavement at that hour, and would probably still be abed.

As it turned out, I was right. Social Justice was going to wait for the evening rush hour, after everyone managed to get a good head of indignation going.

I remember my first taste of that, but it was from the other side. I was down in Washington for the May Day anti-war protests in 1971. I wasn’t protesting, per se, but I was intensively interested in how this was all going to work out, since the Yippies had decided that peaceful non-violent protest was not going to force the end to the Vietnam War, and direct action was required.

It was sort of funny to watch, the green CH-46 helicopters ferrying the 82nd Airborne into town to roust the demonstrators. Little groups of kids were trying to stop traffic, and in one marvelous cameo, I saw a young man wearing a batting helmet rush out into traffic stopped at a light to try to disable a car and block traffic. The Driver got out, furious, and knocked him down before returning to the wheel and driving away.

Times have certainly changed. I mean, these days it is hard to know what is illegal and why. I think Eric Garner knew that selling Loosies was an illegal act- he had certainly been busted before, and local shop-owners had summoned the police who ultimately wound up killing him because Eric was disrupting business.

But the government created the market for Loosies by pricing full packs of cigarettes out of the reach of many people. Mayor Bloomberg had piled a special tax of $1.50 atop the State tax of $4.35 per package of twenty cigarettes. Now that I am a non-smoker, I don’t mind that much, but if you add Federal taxes and the actual cost of the cigarettes themselves, a pack of smokes in New York City runs between $12 and $14 dollars.

No wonder Eric thought he had something going with his Loosie business. Back at the Smoke Shop on the first deck of the USS Midway, we used to pay $2.00 a carton.

What is going on now is just sort of…well, you know. Loonie.

(Image courtesy Huffington Post).

Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303