Last Sunday John F. DiBernardo wrote this tongue-in-cheek LTE to the Keene Sentinel:
It is obvious to everyone in the area that the city of Keene has a problem with people writing and drawing with chalk on the sidewalks of the downtown business district. There have been many suggestions as to how to deal with this scourge, but none as basic, simple and reasonable as the solution I propose. The root of the problem is quite clear: the easy availability of chalk enables anyone to just grab a piece of chalk and, perhaps in a heated moment, or as an act of depraved indifference, to commit acts of drawing or writing that will be rued by all sensible members of society.
No rights are limitless; all we need are reasonable, commonsense city laws controlling the sale and possession of chalk.
Currently, anyone can just walk into any number of local stores and walk out with cases of chalk. Perhaps if people were limited to the purchase of, say, one box of chalk per month we would see a decrease in chalking.
What reasonable person needs hundreds of sticks of chalk? (I would propose an exemption to the law for schoolteachers and others who could demonstrate a valid reason for needing an arsenal of chalk.) This ordinance would also prohibit all colored chalk (except for school teachers, of course.)
If white chalk was good enough for our Founding Fathers, who surely did not envision the spectrum available in modern times, it should be good enough for the ordinary members of today’s society. Also, this ordinance should prohibit the possession of more than one stick of chalk per person within the compact, downtown business district; what valid purpose could a sane, reasonable person have for needing to bring more than one stick of chalk downtown?
I urge all good Keene citizens who wish to see an end to this senseless chalking mayhem to contact their legislators and tell them to stop kowtowing to the powerful chalk lobby and the Big Chalk Industry, and to enact meaningful, common sense laws to restrict the sale and possession of chalk in the city of Keene.
