[Mpls] Campaigning in the parks

[Fredric Markus]

Those park police are going to be busy this weekend! Loring Park will have
score of people wearing buttons, t-shirts, funny hats, and the like, waving
flags and offering campaign literature and persuasive campaign dialogues to
the masses that show up for the days of wine and roses.

At $35 for a permit to sit mute at a table and with a $150 damage deposit to
boot, looks like a real money-maker, doesn't it?

Now if only those naughty candidates and their marching millions would take
the park board staff seriously, assuming that the park commissioners would
somehow find a way to validate a murky bureaucratic rule that somehow
reminds me of Kafka.  

So if I'm just strolling in the park one day, in the merry, merry month of
May, with my partisan t-shirt du jour proclaiming my allegiance to someone's
candidacy, and I impulsively offer a piece of campaign literature to a
passer-by, what will become of me?

Does this escalate into a matter of Kevlar vests, pepper spray, water
cannon, rubber bullets, festive plexiglass shields on the horses of the
mounted patrol? They had these anti-riot accoutrements on the horses last
year when the Prez was preaching to the faithful at the St. Paul hockey
dome. Quite the fashion statement. Forget Easter bonnets and ice cream
socials. We're in a brave new world.

Is this what Commissioners Dziedzic, Fine, Hauser, Kummer, and Olson have in
mind? 

Fred Markus, Ward 6, Phillips West