Hey delegates: Try walking in our shoes for DNC week
By Beth Teitell
Tuesday, July 13, 2004
So they're not content to simply close our roads, rummage through our bags and postpone our elective brow lifts.
Now they - albeit a different they - are asking us to become enablers to our never-ending hassle.
Or, to quote from a postcard I got: “Join WalkBoston” - some misguided do-gooder group, I assume - “and be part of the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Help encourage delegates to walk to the FleetCenter.”
For a moment, swept up in altruism, I imagined myself sprinting the floors of the local hotels, knocking on doors and reminding visitors to wear comfortable shoes and apply sunscreen.
I was (mentally) midway through the Sheraton, when I remembered the lesson I learned a few years ago during a particularly bad Boston winter.
Snow and ice had narrowed the city's sidewalks to luge shoots, and turned Boston pedestrians into Boston drivers, minus the cars. Young, broad-shouldered men (the human equivalent of Hummers), hip-checked the elderly to get to the corner first, and Type A boomers assaulted snow drifts simply to outpace slower walkers.
Well, if WalkBoston's promotion is successful, it's going to be Christmas - or at least winter - in July come convention week. The sidewalks won't actually constrict, it will just feel that way.
Because you know those 35,000 delegates won't walk like normal people (i.e., people who have some place to go). And why should they? What do delegates do the whole time, anyway, other than dress poorly, stand in groups and bellow “The great state of . . .” for the cameras when it's their turn?
In other words, these people aren't walkers - they're amblers. Meanderers even. You'll be trying to commute on foot during the week of the 26th - walking being your only alternative, given that you can't drive and the T is packed - when, why what's this pileup on Boylston?
The Ohio delegation, that's what. Twenty-five abreast. Some on cellphones, announcing their locations to spouses with the good manners to stay home, others with maps spread so wide as to block out the sun, others polling the group about what kind of milk they want in their coffee. (Need I mention the delegate will be in front of you in line at Starbucks?)
Meanwhile, the locals will be angrily honking their belt-mounted horns and flipping other pedestrians the bird.
Fearing an outbreak of sidewalk rage, I called WalkBoston to beg them to call off their promotion. But the executive director, Michael Immel, wouldn't hear of it.
He painted a picture of a shining city on a hill, where everyone is happily striding along, enjoying fresh air and health benefits. In his world, walkers aren't cutting each other off and getting into shouting matches in the Public Garden:
“Bostonians,” he insisted, “will enjoy being the hosts.”
Like a corn field enjoys the locusts. Sorry, I'm having a little host rage. I think I'll go walk it off.
