Posted on 08/25/2002 2:53:38 PM PDT by weegee
NEW YORK -- With people crowding the sidewalks and music from clubs and cars in the air, it was the kind of summer night in Greenwich Village when energy seems to emanate from the pavement. Joseph Edmonds, in a dark baseball cap and a white polo shirt, might have been looking for the right nightclub. Instead, he was looking down the lines of parked cars.
Halfway down the block from a busy corner, he spotted one that towered above the others, its shiny gray paint reflecting light from the streetlamp overhead. "I'm going to get that Excursion down there," he told Renee Benson, a young woman who was scanning the curbsides with him.
"Please do," she replied.
He walked over and took out a card colored the bright orange of a New York City parking ticket, with the word "violation" on it, and slipped it under the windshield wiper of the sport utility vehicle, which turned out to be a Chevrolet Suburban, not a Ford Excursion.
The owner of the Suburban was probably in for a bout of that stomach-dropping feeling that accompanies the discovery of a ticket. But Edmonds and Benson, friends in their 20s, are not with the Police Department. The card was a message from people who hate sport utility vehicles, and the "violation" was owning one.
"Did you get excited when you saw that ad for an SUV in the remote wilderness?" the text on the fake ticket read. "Did you want to sue the manufacturer for false advertising when you started driving it to the shopping center instead?" It went on -- at some length -- to castigate SUVs for their gasoholic tendencies and SUV drivers for buying them.
"Global climate change and unhealthy air impacts all of us," it said. "There's something really wrong about the way SUVs are changing our streets and the air we breathe."
Challenging the owners of SUVs isn't new. In Manhattan, vigilantes have been putting crude fliers trumpeting accusations like "Your car is a killer" on SUVs for at least two years, and in Brooklyn, a magazine editor organized a protest in which a number of "No SUV Parking" signs were placed on a street last December.
But the phenomenon appears to be growing in size and intensity. Edmonds and Benson were working with Earth on Empty, a group that has begun distributing professionally designed and mass-produced ticket look-alikes in a score of states.
Trying a different tactic, two women let the air out of the tires of SUVs parked at Johnson Ford, a dealership in Kingston, N.Y., last year. This month they were sentenced to 50 hours each of community service.
"There are many of us at the dealership who are environmentally aware," said Vincent Martello, the marketing manager of the Johnson Auto Group, which owns the dealership. "I just think that the strategy that they chose was not an effective one."
In their Greenwich Village ticketing foray, Edmonds and Benson didn't wait around to see their victims' reactions. But it's a safe bet they weren't warm ones. What the protesters see as activism looks to some on the receiving end like harassment.
"We get really, really nasty e-mails all the time," said John, a founder of Earth on Empty who monitors messages to the group's Web site, www.earthonempty.com. The address is printed plainly on the phony tickets.
John, who lives in Cambridge, Mass., would give only his first name because, he said, he has been receiving hostile phone calls from people who have somehow found out about his anti-SUV work. But he did share a sampling of the e-mail messages. In just a dozen of them, SUV proponents called Earth on Empty members tree-huggers, time-wasters, socialists, elitists, litterers, blue-collar workers, freedom-removers, leftists, losers, homosexuals, Democrats and filthy people. And those were the printable epithets.
John said he knew of no incidents in which ticketers and SUV owners had met face to face. The group advises its helpers not to give out the tickets before 10 p.m. and not to confront drivers.
The sneak-and-strike policy may be prudent, but it leaves some of the SUV owners incensed. "I don't want to say it's cowardly, but it's leaving something and running," said Darren Thayer, 29, whose Ford Explorer was ticketed in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, on Aug. 3.
Christina Allen, 18, who was with her boyfriend when his '88 Jeep Cherokee was ticketed this month in a Wal-Mart parking lot in Eagan, Minn., said they both thought at first that the flier was a real parking ticket. "Once we figured out what it was," she said, "we were really mad."
Tolerance is our greatest virtue, unless the one asking for tolerance is different from us, drives a vehicle we don't like, has more money (or less money) than everyone else, has a point of view we don't agree with, or has a background we don't care for. Other than that, Tolerance is our greatest virtue.
exactly......can't wait to find the streets littered with all this extra paper....with 'earthonempty' printed on them.
SUV owners get a great deal of off the cuff wrath locally. It is interesting to see the same sort of thing happening back east.
Subject: Rant & Rave Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2001 17:30:16 -0700
I simply don't understand why people want to drive SUV's in the first place. There too big, heavy, cumbersome and hard riding. I drive a truck for a living, so the last thing I want to drive on my own time is another truck! I can't really complain about their mileage due to the fact my '71 Impala ain't much better, but then again there's three decades difference. The plain fact of the matter is that above all else SUV's are a public nuisance and safety hazard.
I am a conservative Republican who wouldn't be caught dead driving an import or holding a Sierra Club membership card nor do I generally approve of government interference, but in this case I agree with you tree huggin' hippies!
OK FOLKS are their any conservative republicans that can agree with anything any tree huggin hippy would do???
I can agree with 'em when they repent.
Wonder why these cowards aren't going after pickup truck owners? ;-)
I wouldn't buy an SUV either.
HOWEVER, I wouldn't give anyone a hard time for exercising their absolute right to do what they want with their money. I don't support civil disobedience like littering peoples' windshields. I don't support the government interfering in purchase decisions in any way, including things like gas guzzler taxes.
If people want to blow their money on SUV's and gas, let'em.
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