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I’m Mad and I Won’t Take It Anymore

By George Capsis

THERE MUST BE A LAW AND IT SHOULD BE ENFORCED: Advertising stickers cover up many lamp posts throughout the City, including one on 6th Avenue and 17th Street—yet another example of unsightly urban blight. Photo by Maggie Berkvist.

I sat in the car on 6th Avenue while Dusty ran into the mobile phone store. All I had to look at was a line forming outside the dollar pizza store (a slice used to cost 10 cents in my day) and a lamp post covered some 20 feet up with small, scruffy, and aged advertising stickers.

“How the hell did the guy get stickers all the way up there?” I thought. I then remarked, “This is nuts! You can’t read them and, month after month, year after year, somebody is paid to paste this visual graffiti on city lamp posts AND NOBODY DOES ANYTHING ABOUT IT!”

But, this morning (February 22nd), I realized, “Wait a minute George, you have a newspaper. You CAN do something about it.”

So, I start thinking that there MUST BE A LAW stating that you can’t slap advertising stickers all over a lamp post or mail box, but it simply never gets enforced. There must be a thousand laws and regulations that never get enforced because it is just too difficult and too expensive to enforce the vast world of gray crimes.

Here is an idea: We have 60,000 homeless people from which we can recruit the CLEAN CORP. They will photograph the stickers, send advertisers fine notices, and then visit them to collect the fines before removing the stickers. Their only pay would come from the offending advertisers, meaning that the program would not cost taxpayers a dime.

Sure, there could be lots of tension with various contingents of the CLEAN CORP contacting the graffiti offenders repeatedly and demanding, “Give us money now or we won’t scrape off your graffiti.” However, the graffiti offenders can always file formal complaints with our vast impenetrable bureaucracy.

 

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