Ok folks, we have absolutely had it! Today I heard something that has me both flummoxed and irate at the same time. Let me give some background information. Over the last several years I have either heard or witnessed the following stories.
The neighboring village to me a few years ago had an incident where a family was holding a birthday party for their twelve year old son. He had a few friends over and relatives and nothing more than the usual ice cream and cake and kids’ games it wasn’t very extraordinary. That is until a neighbor called the cops on them that they were disrupting the neighborhood. The party broke up and everyone went home. But for what?
Then across the Hudson River from me in Scarsdale, NY a group of people from a few adjacent streets joined forces to sue one of their neighbors because they didn’t like the color he painted his house. No it wasn’t fuscia or lime green, just a little off center shade of blue. I never heard what the outcome was which is immaterial, but the lawsuit was the point I strive to make.
Then in Paramus, NJ (where they have Blue Laws strictly regulating Sunday activities) about this same time, it hit the newspapers that police issued a summons to a man for giving his car a tune up in his own driveway.
Then in the late 1990s I found out that a small hamlet in Orange County, NY had lost its library because neighboring villages’ libraries and their local school district conspired to have its library’s license to operate revoked. Why? Because they deemed that because it was in a older building it wasn’t fit to operate and because if it was closed then the other entities could share the revenues which this poor little library originally had for itself.
But as busy-bodyish as these are today I have one that is a quantum leap above and beyond those. A nice young bachelor on the street this summer put out in a chair on his porch a big stuffed teddy bear. Suddenly the bear disappeared and I wondered what had happened to it. This morning I saw him at the market and asked if it had been stolen. He said no, but that he had to take it in because people complained about it. Again totally flummoxed, I had to press the question as to why they disliked it and he just said that “the children all seemed to like it but the adults didn’t”. I told him to forget about those grouches and put it back in the chair to give kids a smile again.
There you have it people, I hope this is a big nightmare resulting from a rough night out but since I’m not a drinker I can’t blame it on that but on the reality that people worry too much about rubbish and not about legitimate reasons to complain.