Legal Daisy Spacing

Planet is awash in problems without ready solutions that you can do little or nothing to cure. But you can, unless disabled, improve self and surroundings. A better world begins internally and locally. For example, you can maintain place you live, mow grass, touch up paint, and trim bushes and hedges. Nobody wants to see debris, mold and overgrowth in their neighborhood. One derelict home lowers property values along entire street. Gracious gardens and pleasant ambience are gifts to whole town.

Nobody suggests sanctions or sentences for spacing daisies too far apart, though there are such rules as maximum unrelated occupancy, minimum housing standards, property setbacks, and zoning restrictions. You can’t park cars overnight on sidewalks or streets, can’t strew yard with junk, must remove ice and snow from public frontage, need to obtain permits to establish a daycare center, group home, public tavern, or retail store. Promptly remove garbage bins after pickup and store out of plain sight, not in front or on curb; lazy habits can cause traffic tragedies. Anything doesn’t go, though many things do. Usually penalties come as civil suits rather than arrests or fines, though both are possible.

Plus brains aren’t popular today. Experts who were placed in positions of trust betrayed and disappointed, consequently many distrust facts and fakes. Conservatives ushered in banking deregulation, biased news, citizen surveillance, constitutional bypasses, illegal wars, and unitary power aligned with dictatorships and monarchies. Education and endowments took a beating, with funding diverted from performers and students to directors and presidents. Without schools that teach not only job skills but ways to properly discriminate between facts and lies and teach self the truth, you get sheeple easily hoodwinked and violated. Rage against a statue in Columbus Square is misplaced, but there's rightly none of Cortés, who pillaged and slaughtered, so an intrepid explorer who codified Caribbean customs and languages and conquered no one gets defamed. Typical, ill informed zealots seek someone who can easily be blamed. The proof is made plain in social injustice and widest gap between poor and wealthy in recorded history. It’s a zero sum game in which nobody wins, not even billionaires who depend upon armies of unsung heroes while denying them any chance to thrive, not smart at all.

View toward downtown from H.P. Lovecraft's Grave, Swan Point Cemetery: "I am Providence."

Brutal taxation, insufficient funds, and national policies impact appearance. Poor people give up, lack tools, neglect homes, wear rags. If world’s going to end soon, does it matter? When you recall how Providence once looked, stately homes lining neatly paved streets with public parks dotted with artistic plantings under a canopy of mature elms, maples and oaks, the contrast to today’s wasteland makes you wonder. The 13th State was once nation’s richest per capita with plenty of jobs for able apprentices at mills all along 13 busy rivers. Colleges arose to graduate classes of well-informed citizens. Yet it was also a vacation spot for untouchable robber barons who built palaces on Newport’s cliffed coast and exemplified disparities of power and wealth.

Parks extended gardens to less fortunate masses, plus inspired many home owners to emulate on smaller scales. Anyone who rolls slow enough takes note and utters thanks to those who decorate a doorstep or develop a perennial border. All that effort isn’t in vain, as blooms and foliage boost mood and fight depression. Plus yardening provides aerobic activity outdoors that builds stamina, fights disease, and fulfills deficiencies of oxygen and Vitamin D.

Little Rhody has suffered economic decline as a target of political retribution for predominant Democrat votes and unchecked bank, developer, and insurer greed. For line access utilities cut tree limbs. Diseases took elms. Maples and oaks fueled fires. Costs very little to replant forests, though land gets snapped up for new housing tracts upon which to live the alleged American Dream, which lately accounts for 90% of population in six figure debt. Cable providers and other utilities are monopolies that demand outrageous fees for what little they offer. Annual property taxes in cities and towns are so high they force you to rebuy your home every decade or so. Cuts to state aid to cities and towns resulted in recurring double digit tax hikes. But pruning, raking, and recycling organic debris into soil improving compost cost nothing; you can also for free divide perennials to extend plantings or swap plants with other gardeners.

Restaurants fail so often, one suspects that huge capital investments can’t react to dining trends and readily adapt to suit. How do food trucks fit in? They are hard to regulate if they stick to private property with owner’s permission or public streets. Ice cream vendors and lemonade trucks prowl wherever a sale once occurred. Without food, festivals fall flat. Commerce draws patrons and enlivens shared space. But eateries demand sanitary facilities. Beer and beverage dispensers should park alongside places where anyone, including them, can pee, then wash hands; otherwise, what’s the infectious aftermath? Epidemics of Cholera? Hepatitis? It’s an attraction of merit when a microbrewer invites a food truck, thus meets all needs. And such pairings need not be temporary. One bike shop serves coffee and pastry. A farm stand features a popular deli with eat-in seating. Several new restaurants feature local farm to table. What matters are businesses anticipating customers’ needs, investing capital into them, and supporting entire community. Small business accounts for bulk of economy, and government gives few breaks other than to big business.

You’d imagine all this carping might condemn state’s residents and disrespect local entrepreneurs. Quite the contrary. You only chime in when you care. Robert Curley arbitrarily and histrionically lists 100 Things to Do in Rhode Island Before You Die, though many you’d only recommend to tourists, not friends, like drop a c-note to bloat your belly on Nordic Lodge delicacies, perilously skydive, or surf waves. Blount’s in Warren or Iggy’s in Warwick are eateries to visit before Ye Olde English Fish & Chips in Woonsocket. Aunt Carrie’s in Point Judith allegedly invented the clam cake. Locally all three clam shacks are legendary. You’d think he’d include bona fide attractions of farmer’s markets in Lippitt Park and Pawtucket, Glocester’s Brown & Hopkins General Store, historical houses, leaf peeping in northwestern towns, Memorial day commemoration at Exeter's Veteran's Cemetery, Newport mansions, RISD museum, Roger Williams Park, Swan Point Cemetery on a sunny day, and White Horse Tavern, though may have presumed those things had already been done. There’s no want for events, exhibitions, food, meetups, seasonal attractions, shopping, and things to occupy your time.

Before the next recession is the time to fix bridges, parks, paths, and roads, foster improvements, and realign attitudes. You need not tolerate asphalt overuse, creeping deserts, crumbled roads, sloppy properties, ugly strip malls, or urban blight. Neither should you be bullied by bad advice nobody ought to listen to.