Missoula Notebook

A Line in the Gravel

By Sutton Stokes, 11-10-09

	If good fences make good neighbors, just imagine what razor wire can do. Photo by Flickr user purple monkey dish washer, used under a Creative Commons license.

Back in college, my class in informal logic taught me that reliance on slippery-slope arguments was a sign of weak reasoning, but this “fact” was probably just part of a coordinated misinformation campaign being pushed by my professors, who in addition to being liberals might also have been child molesters. (I certainly never saw any evidence that they weren’t.)

Now that I am no longer a naive young college student, I can see that those professors were cut from the same cloth as the scum currently trying to convince us that making health insurance more affordable won’t have an outcome roughly similar to that shown in the massive photograph of Dachau victims displayed by Tea Partiers at last Thursday’s protest on Capitol Hill.

And once you take your blinders off, it only makes sense to start referring to the traitorous Representative Anh Joseph Cao—the only Republican to vote with Democrats to pass the House version of the health-insurance-reform death-of-America bill—as Representative Mao. Sure, Cao isn’t responsible for the deaths of millions—yet—but as the Dachau sign proves beyond a shadow of a doubt, it’s only a matter of time.

I’m just glad that the Tea Partiers have opened my eyes to how quickly one thing can turn into another much worse thing, because now I’m thinking a little more clearly about a situation right here in my own neighborhood.

The lot across the alley from my house is subdivided in half, with one house facing the street and another smaller one facing the alley. We were all glad when the previous resident—a woman who used to stand in the alley for half an hour at a time, trying to get her dog to come home by screaming profanity at it—moved out.

As usual, however, one must be careful what one wishes for.

Soon after the new owner moved in, we noticed what I’m only now realizing were the early signs of naked aggression. First, much like Hitler did to the Sudetenland, our new neighbor quickly annexed the dead end of the alley between our properties as his own personal parking lot.

This seemed reasonable at the time—after all, he only had room to park one vehicle on the property he’d actually paid for, and he needed an additional parking space for when his father visits. And one for his other truck. And one for his drift boat. And one for the tenant he had crammed into the tiny house’s basement. And one for her boyfriend. Not to mention space for an engine on top of a pile of cargo pallets, a canoe, some big spools of wire fencing, and whatever bottles of antifreeze and motor oil he doesn’t feel like carrying back across his property line when he’s done with them.

Then, when Amy and I returned from her summer field-work season in Arizona, we discovered our trash can over in his yard, full of hedge trimmings. Sure, another trash can with broken sides had been left on the little trash-can shelf on the side of our garage, but it didn’t feel like an even trade. I’m sure the oil companies whose production facilities Hugo Chavez nationalized in Venezuela probably felt the same way.

As for that tenant, she uses the alley as her own personal dog run but apparently hasn’t noticed that there are no employees to pick up her pooches’ leavings. The only comparison I can think of here is to multinational corporations using third-world countries as dumping grounds for toxic waste, but that would be kind of socialist of me, so I guess I’ll just let this one go.

Anyway, I was thinking of going over and knocking on my neighbor’s door to, you know, negotiate about some of this stuff.  But now that the Tea Partiers have helped open my eyes, I’m starting to realize how naive that would be. After all, while everything he’s done so far has been merely inconvenient, what’s next?

I mean, if I don’t draw a line in the sand gravel, what is to stop this neighbor from cutting a hole in the wall of my garage and installing his own door? After that step is complete, there will be little to prevent him from drilling down through the concrete pad and digging a tunnel between here and Mexico, so that he can smuggle illegal immigrants and methamphetamine into my backyard. At that point, it might only be a matter of time before he walks into our bedroom one night and clubs Amy and me to death like baby seals.

I’m still thinking about what steps to take, but it’s clear that inaction is not an option. As Edmund Burke wrote the Tea Partiers are fond of saying, “all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”

Wish me luck, and may God bless America.

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