THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, September 15, 1995 TAG: 9509140152
SECTION: CHESAPEAKE CLIPPER PAGE: 06 EDITION: FINAL
LENGTH: Medium: 52 lines
``Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out.''
- Robert Frost
The folks at City Hall are about to spend up to $10,000 of the people's money to erect a barricade at the entrance to the sixth floor of City Hall, where the mayor, the councilmen and the city clerk have their offices.
Its function, explained Mayor William E. Ward, would be to stop people who ``come marching in here with a problem and...want to see the mayor.''
Society is becoming increasingly violent, he said, and there's a heightened sense of anger toward government in particular.
The barrier at City Hall will be nowhere near the scale of the Berlin Wall or the Great Wall of China, but the mayor, a professor of history, must recognize the similarities. Throughout the ages, governments have erected walls as a way of isolating themselves from undesirables.
The City Hall barricade, we are told, will be equipped with an electronic lock controlled by city staff members. When someone on the inside wants someone on the outside to pass through, the push of a button will open the gate. No push, no entrance.
If, for example, a citizen wants to complain because the water he buys from the city isn't fit to drink, the people on the inside might decide the fellow has nothing to say they haven't heard before. He'll be sent away to speak his piece to a bureaucrat on one of the lower floors of the building.
If, on the other hand, some bigshot wants to talk to a council member about a topic of compelling interest to him - say, a donation to his re-election campaign - the entrance can be flung open as wide as the gates of heaven.
Not long ago, this City Council became so annoyed over pushy citizens who didn't know their place that it rewrote the rules governing speakers at its public meetings. A barricade barring access to the sixth floor of City Hall could be interpreted as the logical next step.
Goodness knows, we don't want to compromise the safety of anyone. But in citing the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City as justification for the proposed barrier, the mayor must realize that it will be far more effective at keeping out citizens with legitimate business than at stopping Ryder trucks filled with explosives.
If people feel increasingly angry at their government and alienated from it, it is because there are already too many walls built to keep them out. by CNB