Marc Carlisle: Understanding 4.20 means understanding civil disobedience

Click to Enlarge Browse and Buy Summit Daily Photos Marc Carlisle Get Columnists Feeds

BY MARC CARLISLE
On the Marc
April 23, 2008

Comments
Print Email

Denver’s Civic Center Park, like many municipal parks, was designed as an open invitation to come visit, but when built everyone sent their regrets. The lawns that on paper look so inviting offer no shade from the sun or protection from the wind and to survive must be watered morning and evening.

Function long ago discarded the open plazas and stone colonnades and statuary whose form is preserved in Europe yet pointlessly recreated in the park’s buildings.

Today, in Denver, bounded on all sides by multilane moats of asphalt, Civic Center is a park with no parking, but whose central location, yet relative isolation by the car traffic all around have given it purpose and one very interested — ahem — user group.

As a man without a MySpace account, I still think of myself as more aware of trends and happenings outside my day to day than a correspondent who pointed out that 4.20, April 20, is Hitler’s birthday.

4.20 is also the day Jimi Hendrix died, giving rise to one of the many urban legends about the origin of 420, a term used as slang/code to refer to the use of marijuana. Right now, one-in-three of you reading the Daily is giggling because that last reads like something a narc would say — “a term used as slang/code to refer to the use of marijuana”.

Christ! You’re also giggling because one-in-three of you have already used today, so yeah, you got the rest of us with your first hand knowledge. To me, while 4:20 is a time of day, I know a bit about 420, although not so much that I can’t still be surprised when mountain biking to be the rider who brought only Gu or playing poker in a smoky room without the Marlboro Man.

I know that public acceptance has reached a point where I can be standing on the sidewalk talking to a rabbi and have him nod a greeting to passers-by moving a hand-rolled between them. While many voters have said they would prefer law enforcement give the prosecution of marijuana laws a low priority, use is still a crime, a Federal crime, no matter which way the local breezes blow.

So when another friend mentioned his visit to Civic Center Park this past Sunday, April 20, 4.20, I was still naïve and startled enough to learn that several hundreds were expected to gather to break the law in a public spark, as they had last year, with press coverage, without fear of penalty or even a police presence.

Collectively, we accept thousands killed annually by drunk drivers, and more thousands of cases of child and spousal abuse fueled by booze, so perhaps we should legalize the stuff then regulate its content and availability as we do alcohol, even though we’re still waiting for a single case of a husband belting his wife in a 420-fueled rage.

I refuse to accept the notion, though, that it’s harmless or victimless. We, collectively, face a real problem perhaps best not addressed through law enforcement if so many can’t face the day without the stuff.

Regardless of the nature of the problem, using marijuana is still a crime, and a society that allows its members to pick and choose which laws they will respect is not a society. Civil disobedience has a place in changing bad laws, but I guarantee that Rosa Parks was not in Civic Center Park last Sunday.

The police were, though, in the hundreds, on horseback and in black and whites and on foot. In recent months, there’s been a noticeable increase in one-way don’t come back ‘til fall RTD bus travel by the homeless from Denver to Boulder and vigorous enforcement of local laws (honestly, there’s a law) restricting the sale of spray paint to minors.

With the Democratic convention coming up, Denver is intent on giving the visiting press and delegates a clean park with no homeless, no graffiti, and no 420. Only 30 arrests were made Sunday, while the rest scattered quickly and quietly, not to return until election madness has passed by, and the promises of change and togetherness by delegates who’ve never done without a day in their lives is replaced by the reality of division.

In the face of such enormous hypocrisy, the surprise is not that so many use, the surprise is that more don’t.

Marc Carlisle writes a Thursday column. He can be reached at summitindie@yahoo.com.