Todd Stadler's blog

A new definition of 'free'?

Last week, while I was hanging out at the airport waiting to pick up Oakland Todd, I noticed some young men in suits handing out literature.

You can always tell such people are religiously affiliated, because pretty much no one else in an airport (1) wears suits and (2) just stands around. Business people wear suits, true, but they're always rushing somewhere with their wheeled luggage or staring deeply into a laptop screen. And, yes, there are those people in airports who never seem to be in a hurry to get anywhere (I'm looking at you, luggage cart people), but they're never wearing suits.

Even though I'm religious myself and in favor of people sharing what they believe, I tend to ignore such well-dressed loiterers for the reason I assume most people do: when I'm at the airport, I'm going somewhere, not hanging around looking for a philosophical discussion.

But on this particular day, I wasn't going anywhere, and the light rail schedule had conspired to drop me off at the airport quite a bit before my friend's plane arrived, so I found myself in the unique position of looking for something to do, someone to talk to ... like, say, that Jehovah's Witness over there near the escalators.

It's not that I was particularly eager to have him tell me about his faith, given that I find that my Lutheran understanding of Christianity meets my needs and answers my questions, and from what I know of the Jehovah's Witnesses' teaching ... well, not so much. If anything, I was pondering the irony of talking to him about my faith, he being a captive audience and yet likely predisposed to discussions about God and all.

But I was mainly motivated by the desire to just talk to him, find out how it's going, what's up, what he thinks, hello, and so on. It's too easy — again, even for a Christian like me — to view religious solicitors as inhuman monoliths of dogma, wanting nothing more than to shoot down your views with a sharp retort and notch invisible points on their allegorical stone tablet. Um, or something like that.

So I walked up and shook his hand. Judging by his reaction, I'd guess this doesn't happen a lot in his line of work. Heck, it doesn't happen much in my line of work — or leisure! — either.

I asked him how things had gone that day, how he came to be there, and things like that. It was all unremarkable small talk until he mentioned the particular hurdles involved in getting permission to stand around in an airport.

I guess I'd never thought much about it, but I was surprised that you couldn't just show up at the airport and stand there. I mean, you can, but only if your purpose is solely to stand there, waiting to go somewhere. And, if while you're waiting, you happen to talk to people, that's fine. But, he explained, if you show up with the express intent of standing there and hoping to talk to people, then you need a permit.

"Ha!" I said to him, "Like some sort of 'free speech permit' or something?" Chuckle.

And then he took out a piece of paper from his suit pocket and unfolded it. At the top, it read "Permit for the Exercise of Free Speech". Oh.

I guess I'm some kind of naive free-love hippie to think that a permit for free speech seems ... oh, I don't know, a bit odd. I can think of some reasons why one would want a permit system, sure. And I'm not even sure how public the airport is, really, that just anyone would be able to get a permit to, ahem, speak freely there.

Still, a permit system implies that there are reasons one's application could be rejected. Reasons that you wouldn't be allowed to exercise your free speech, as it were. I don't like that.

But my thoughts on police states and civil liberties suddenly came to an end when Oakland Todd called my mobile phone, trying to figure out where I was. To my Jehovah's Witness friend, it might have seemed that I simply got tired of chatting with him, since my set-to-vibrate phone gave no obvious indication that it was ringing, prompting me to quickly end our conversation.

And so I leave you with this thought: aren't mobile phones cool?