Dear George,

I’ve been a supporter since it began of the Living Wage Campaign at UVa, where I work, and it has encouraged me greatly to find the idea catching on in City Chambers and businesses across Charlottesville. But I never made it out to the Friday protests that the Virginia Organizing Project has sponsored at the spiffy Marriott on Main Street -- never, that is, until I read in the paper that local police had taken to arresting traffic-slowed motorists for the unprecedented offense of Solidarity Honking While Sympathetic. Vacillating in my incredulity between laughter and outrage, I decided I had to see (and hear) for myself what was going on.

So out I went last Friday the 3rd, a TGIF afternoon hot but not too hot, to take my stand outside the Marriott Courtyard Inn, where for a stiff fee well-heeled guests are treated to all the cleanliness that gutter wages can procure, and where management will endanger constitutional safeguards if that’s what it takes to shelter patrons against vulgar acoustic provocation. I picked up a pre-fab placard, encased in plastic against the elements, as nice a job in its way as the tasteful Marriott sign itself. “HONK NOW,” it enjoined the passing driver, the implication being, I guess, Before It’s Too Late. (But then what did that imply? Before you’ve driven too far and your honk risks irrelevance? Before you’ve driven the police too far and another form of free political expression goes down the tubes? Before Marriott finally sees the signal has changed, comes up to the mark of other local employers, and we can all move on?) Maybe a dozen protesters on either side of Main Street soliciting klaxon action from the traffic flowing in either direction, a steady trickle of pedestrians picking their way through. A whole orchestra of honks, ranging from the pip discreet to the sostenuto aggravato. Some waves, some words mainly unintelligible but apparently friendly. Oh, and two constables standing by their parked cruiser at the epicenter of trouble.

Cops and honkers! So what happened? Nothing arresting. Halfway through the hour, in fact, the police officers took their courteous leave, trusting us all to behave ourselves, wishing me personally a good day in fact, but not going so far as to emit a friendly toot as they rolled from the curb into traffic. Nothing arresting, then, except the welcome spectacle -- and is it audible?-- of civil rights aerobically exercised.

Herbert Tucker (electronic mail, August 7, 2001).