BarkingDogs.net

Why the Out of Channels Approach is a Must

Introduction

When your neighbor fills your home with the sound of his barking dog, or any other intrusive noise for that matter, it is an emergency situation for you and everyone in your family. Obviously, there is the threat to everyone's health, plus all the emotional fallout from a family that finds itself trapped in a home where they are no longer able to meet their basic needs of sleep, rest, relaxation, and stability.

Even watching television or having a simple conversation becomes an impossibility in that circumstance, but perhaps even worse, the kids no longer have a quiet place to do their homework and their parents find that their in-home office is so toxic with externally-generated noise that they can no longer work there, and everyone's performance suffers as the kids fall behind in school, perhaps never to catch up.

Living in a noisy, sleep-deprived, pressure-cooker like that, in no time at all, everyone is at each others' throats, as the marriage begins to disintegrate and the family starts to come apart. The situation is, in a word, an emergency.

Petitioning for Emergency Relief Through Official Channels

Every town has procedures that were put in place to deal with people who complain about noise. Please notice that I did not say that every town has procedures in place to deal with noise, I said they have procedures in place to deal with people who complain about noise, especially when it comes to barking dogs.

Unfortunately, when you call the authorities for help with your devastating noise crisis, those procedures will kick in, triggering an official response in which your dire emergency will be processed as though you had reported experiencing the slightest of inconveniences. As a result, the city fathers will insist that you lobby people in the neighborhood who don't want to talk to you, and they will want you to reason with people who are unreasonable and won't hear you out. Then, they will want you to gather signatures on forms that no one will sign, and secure letters that no one will agree to write, as you rely on laws that almost never produce results, and when they do, certainly never do so in a timely fashion.

Of course, in some places, the police will often respond to a phone call by taking action against some particular types of noise, like a neighbor blasting music over an amplified system. But clearly, when it comes to dealing with the noise emanating from most sources, the established procedures were not devised for the purpose of helping you quiet your home. Rather, the existing procedures for processing complaints developed as they have because of their proven effectiveness at shielding the higher-ups in the city bureaucracy from the anger and pitiful pleas of the countless noise abuse victims, like you, who besiege the city every day, desperate for relief.

Therefore, as long the established procedures remain in place, and the citizenry complies with the prescribed routine, it will always be the beleaguered clerk at animal control and the lowly dispatcher at police headquarters who take almost all the heat, while the politicians who created and now refuse to correct the problem are able to escape the consequences of their failure to protect the public health through the establishment of effective noise laws.

You don't have to be Mario Savio to know that if you want things to change things, then, you are going to have to get to the real culprites who, up until now, have nested comfortably at the top, insulated from the wrath of those who have been injured by their inaction. To get to those who are really to blame, you have to circumvent the lowly, powerless, diversionary peons with their silly stacks of stupid forms, and start scoring some informational hits on the culpable elite, who heretofore have remained above it all, snug and untouched at the top of the food chain.

Circumventing the Run-Around

In the midst of an ongoing noise emergency, you have to be a fool to go on endlessly petitioning the lower echelon for relief that never comes, while your family suffers continuously. And we would be fools now to think that we can ever hope to bring effective pressure to bear by working through channels that were put in place to neutralize our efforts.

If we want things to change, then, we are going to have to put heat on all of the highly insulated politicos who usually escape the wrath of the noise abuse victims who have suffered injury due to their failure to address the problem. Therefore, to command the attention of the politicians who have the power to change things, we are going to have to take our complaints outside of the established channels, and behave in ways that our negligent public officials will find impossible to ignore.

To accomplish that, we recommend that you consider delivering your message to your local public officials by way of the telephone. That way you can launch your informational salvos with ease, in no time at all, without disrupting your life or making hardly any effort.

This page is part of the Strategies portion of Section Eight:
which is the Activist section of barkingdogs.net