A role for pebbles

"Jay!" he exclaimed, "You just gave me a great idea."
"I did? Well, give me it back because I could use one."

Mark, Jay's friend and editor, wasted no time, but raced to his car and drove home to write a column on his epiphany.

The next morning he came back to the office with a gleaming smile. "I may just get time for this, but I'd prove a point," he said as he started the truck and headed for the warehouse. When he got there, he pushed up the large garage door, walked over to the pile of tomorrow's newspapers -- every one in the chain, which was about half the newspapers in the city -- and loaded them into the truck. He still didn't tell Jay what his idea was.

"There's supposed to be little if any wind tomorrow, right?"
"I guess. What are you going to do?"

After driving to the park, Mark took a stack of papers out of the truck and started laying them on the sides of the path. "Pebbles, just in case," he said as he looked around and found a handful of stones to place on top of the papers. Continuing his run, he handed a few to Jay.

"I don't want to be your accomplice," said Jay.

"Yes you do," Mark replied. "They're taxing newspapers because they see our whole industry as a waste. We're struggling as it is, and now they're giving people just one more reason to not buy a paper."

"So how is scattering papers all over the park going to help?"

"It'll do several things, depending on the kind of person. If they're environmentalists, they'll be deeply offended, collect all of them and send them to the recycling center. If they're skeptics, they'll pick up one, read the daily news, then probably throw it away. If they're political, they'll pick one up, read the daily news, become deeply offended and then probably throw it in the garbage. If they're unemployed, they'll skip to the classified section, look for a job, then probably use it to wrap their presents."

"So basically, people will do the same thing they'd do if the papers were at the stand, just in a shorter span of time," Jay observed.

"Exactly! The quicker they're taken the quicker we'll run out. Come noon time, the 50% who grab a paper on their lunch break will be agitated that they have nothing to read with their afternoon coffee. After a few days of this, people will notice how much a part of their lifestyle newspapers are, and they'll either rally to have the tax removed or willingly put out the extra dime for something they now see as a necessity."

"Ok," said Jay. "But what if word gets out that the paper is scattered all over the park?"

"I see your point. Are newspapers really a nuisance for them, or is the whole issue just fuel for their cause? Nothing keeps recycling centers going like paper, and just about every day there's a paper that leaves a column open for green street's opinion. Even they need us."

They continued their masquerade while they talked, and by now all of the Main Street Park walkways were surrounded by the seven major newspapers of the city. It was about 5:30 a.m. The first morning rushers were entering town with their dew-covered headlights glaring through the dark fog. The brisk November morning could have been midnight, but the lamposts in the park were beginning to dim, and the moon was beginning to set. There was only a little breeze and the pebbles did their job.

When mark and Jay finished they went back to their office on Exchange Street. If that morning changed their common course of thought, then they didn't show it. From 7:30 a.m. on, their day was filled with the same hectic business of phone calls with upset, satisfied, and bored costomers; until noontime.

It wasn't strange enough to see newspapers all over the park, but it was exasperating for businessmen of all sorts to see empty newstands throughout downtown, just as Mark predicted. The phones of The Current Publishers office rang off the hook, and as they did Mark began his second column. He even used some of the complaints as quotes:

"What do you think you're doing? Do you have any idea how important it is for a busy man like me to know what's going on in my neighborhood? No news channel gives me that! No radio station suffices. I need words on a page. I can't bring my laptop to lunch," said Randy Traimor, a broker from downtown.
You'd think a lousy dime of taxes wouldn't get people all tangled up like this, but the change they have for a newspaper is as preset as their alarm clocks. Don't mess with a business man's alarm clock.
"I buy a whole stack of each paper every morning for my office," said Edward Callihan, president of York Real Estate. "I like to keep all my employees informed about every little movement in our area. What am I supposed to do now?" A stack is forty or fifty papers. There's fifteen major newspapers in our city. That's an extra $67.50 Mr. Callihan has to dish out every morning, if the city starts taxing this essential commodity.

You could imagine how bad mark got it the next morning, but you'd probably be wrong. His readers saw his point. He didn't misquote anyone, and in reality he was right. The same people who were mad at there being no papers at their stand were mad when they found out the city was trying to tax the journalists' pages.

But the state got after him. Here's an example of the difference between a democracy and a republic.