Dan's Papers - July 25, 2008 - The View From the Ferry: Sign Up Here to Join BIMBY

"It's been a quiet week on Shelter Island," Garrison Keeler would say if he lived here. But unlike the serenity of Lake Wobegon, our temporary peace and quiet here hasn't got much to do with the old-fashioned common sense of Norwegian bachelor farmers. The party crowd shot its wad in the first half of July - they all show up at once, like caribou or lemmings - and now they're back home recharging their iPhones and saving up to put gas in the Hummer for the next onslaught. Rebeca and I have settled into the new house. The place is '70s modern, built in the shape of a hexagon with a solar atrium in the middle. It's even got one of those old console stereos that seem to pick up music stations out of the past. I keep expecting a round bed with Matt Helm and Modesty Blaise in it to emerge from one of the walls.

So, things are mostly nice and easy around here, but if you pick up this week's local paper, you'll see that a little wackiness is always in the air. The campaign to turn the Ram's Head Inn into a drug and alcohol detox/rehab center has taken a fascinating turn. The lawyer for the offense has taken the position, in a published letter, that the new business's operators don't need permission in the form of a variance from the Zoning Board in order to make the change, because, get this, it's not really a change at all. A rehab, he says, is the same thing as an inn, because "it houses people." He has also dragged out a hackneyed, but still very effective, technique to discourage opposition, by calling any objections to the place "discriminatory." The rehab's prospective guests, and I assume this would include Britney Spears, are protected by The Americans with Disabilities Act, so you're not allowed to object to their presence and, if you do, you'll get sued. This is not an idle threat. Judges find in favor of stuff like this all the time.

Now, I haven't got a Webster's handy, but I seem to recall that, back when we still spoke some English, before the word came to mean something else entirely, having the ability to "discriminate" was a good thing, meaning you knew how to tell the difference between one thing and another. The opposite condition, being "indiscriminate," meant you were too lazy or foolish to recognize any differences. None of that matters now, of course, to anybody but Webster, and he's dead.

So, nobody wants to be called "discriminatory." Not as bad, but no cigar either, is to be accused of NIMBY-ism. Americans have been fed the notion that it is not only unfair, but downright cheesy, to object to things which their common sense tells them they shouldn't want to have anywhere near them. Bomb factories, chemical plants, prisons, halfway houses and all-the-way houses are thus made to seem more desirable by making the people who object to them seem less so. NIMBY, which stands for "Not In My Backyard," lumps together the dirty, rotten, selfish, comfortable and represents them as an obstacle to progress at best and discriminatory at worst. In an American courtroom, this is a double whammy nobody stands a chance against.

So, in order to show that we are right-thinking and fair on balance, I have formed a new group, called BIMBY, or "Be In My Backyard," whose mission it will be to attract problematic businesses and people to nice neighborhoods. Shelter Island will lead the way, so, whatever nobody else wants, we'll take right here. Bring it on.

BIMBY's first project will be to relocate the entire prison population of Riker's Island to Shelter Island's Town Center. We'll be taking over the firehouse, the IGA and maybe some private homes, too, if we run short of bed space. If this sounds crazy to you, you're being discriminatory. Think about it. Riker's Island/Shelter Island. They're both islands. One island is just like another island. There's no difference, so we don't need anybody's permission. But we'd still appreciate your tax-deductible contribution.

I'm seeing the whole place, in a couple of years, looking very much like the locked-down, but freewheeling, penal colony they made out of Manhattan Island in the movie Escape from New York. Remember? Kurt Russell as Snake Plisskin in eye-patch and black leather? But we've got one big security advantage going for us here - no 59th Street Bridge.