BarkingDogs.net

How the Game is Played

When you begin to press the powers-that-be for effective noise regulation, you will quickly discover that you and they exist in parallel universes, where each has a different set of facts to go along with wildly differing perceptions and interpretations of events.

You know that noise is a dangerous threat to the public health.
But your local officials think that, at worst, noise is a minor inconvenience.

You believe that you have a right to a quiet home where your family can relax in peace during the day and sleep undisturbed at night.
But the authorities insist that you don't.

You think that the authorities should be ashamed, because their failure to protect the public health by effectively regulating noise constitutes gross negligence, if not a betrayal of the public trust.
They think the noise laws are just fine, and they are unlikely to admit that noise is a dangerous pathogen, much less confess that they are to blame for the devastation caused by their failure to regulate it.

You see yourself as one of the good guys, promoting the public welfare by working to protect the public health.
But you are likely to find that the people in charge view you as you're a crackpot, fussbudget. They may even attempt to portray you as being dangerous or deranged.

Subverting the Dominant Paradigm

The dominant paradigm then, holds that noise is not a problem.

To subvert that paradigm, you must present the facts and confront the authorities with the truth as often as your situation comfortably allows.

One of the most efficient ways to do that is for you to telephone the office of your local politician/decision makers regularly, but with a frequency that is restrained enough to allow you to continue to carry your effort on over time. You need not spend more than a few seconds on the phone on any given sortie. All you have to do is to telephone the office of the targeted politico and then, regardless of who answers, be it machine or carbon-based, just identify yourself and briefly speak your piece before bidding them good day, hanging up and going about your business. There's nothing to it, and it takes no time at all.

The Value of Persistence

Whatever it is you do, be it telephone or tete-a-tete, the trick is to keep it up over time. If some particular public official should grow demonstrably irate, you may want to temporarily move that person's number to a lower spot on the rotation list, but you never stop calling on them.

The general rule is, unless you know that the public servant in question is actively working for noise reform, keep contacting or otherwise impacting them on a regular, though intermittent basis, to report your acoustic plight, and keep it up for as long as noise imperils your family and endangers your countrymen.

By refusing to act to end the acoustic abuse to which your family is subjected, the authorities make a meta statement that the particular type of victimization which you are suffering is unworthy of an immediate response. However, by refusing to accept their definition of the event as a non-emergency, and by delineating the perils of noise exposure at every opportunity, you subvert the dominant paradigm, displacing it with the truth, thereby moving our public servants that much closer to the realization that, in the real world - noise destroys all that human kind holds dear.

The End Game

Keep in mind that using a telephone or a computer to protest out of channels is not like storming the Bastille, or fighting some similarly decisive engagement. Rather, it is more like chipping away at a monolith with a small hammer, or firing a BB gun at a glass house. One person doing it a time or two won't have any effect at all. But if even a tiny percentage of noise victims adopt a policy of regularly using the telephone to turn on the heat downtown, the dominant paradigm will begin to crumble.

Just keep stirring the pot as you continually prod your local officials to defend your right to a healthily quiet home. About all they can really do to make you stop is to get a restraining order forbidding you to call again in the future for some specified period of time. However, that would be a great victory, because the restraining order causes you no harm, but it does force the politician to think about noise, and his culpability for failing to protect the public health in that regard. And one just has to think that, when we get to the point where all the politicians are spending a major portion of their time trying to make people stop complaining about noise, that maybe then the light will come on.

Go forward to learn why it is essential that you work out of channels

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