In its munificence, the municipality gifts its citizens with things they don't want: dog-free beaches, wine-free parks, a ghostly gallery of spy cameras watching them perform their private lives.
Much rule-making seems to be about the perfidy of animals. A sleeping settler-cat on a front porch is deemed a threat to indigenous bird species. Take your Hound of the Basking-villains to the beach and he'll be accused of plotting mass-murder of gulls. The birds don't care about the dogs, but the humans are squawking.
They also squawk about garbage cans: raccoons and bears get into them. So ban the beasts, or at least spy on them with surveillance cameras. But wait … the cameras are showing a different bin-vasion: homeless tent-people rummaging and plundering.
Oh, well that's different ... don't ban the tent-slums. It's the bears who are homeless though: they preferred forest-food to garbage-can food but their forests were logged bit by bit as the suburbs spread and human housing took over. So they moved next door to us.
The parks sprinkled around suburbia are heavily monitored and planted with a forest of signs sporting red circles slashed with black lines: NO SMOKING, NO PARKING, NO CARS HERE, NO BALL-THROWING, NO DRINKING, NO FEEDING WILDLIFE, and above all: NO DOGS. And if you do smoke, there will be NO ASH TRAYS, although this doesn't mean less smoking, only more butts on the ground.
If you take a sip of wine at a picnic in these parks you could be fined, but if you buy, sell and inject hard drugs in a homelessness tent-encampment you'll be enabled, because you're vulnerable and disadvantaged. (If you're a kid playing in a park with tents, don't take your shoes off because you never know what will be lying on the ground.)
Eventually you keep right out of the park. If you drive a car you're committing mass murder via climate change, but you have no other way of getting to a different park or a beach where dogs are permitted and tents aren't -- it being hard to take a dog on a bike.
Some citizens ask whether we need all this surveillance and these prohibitions? The Municipal Council held a meeting about that and decided to form a committee whose minutes would be sent to a bigger committee who would report back to Council at a future meeting (or ten), after consulting municipal staff who would first commission a study and host an interactive meeting …
So don't stay tuned. Just stay home -- if you're lucky enough to have a back yard. Feed birds and squirrels, throw a frisbee and watch comical raccoons knocking over your garbage can. Plant tall trees and big hedges to block out the neighbours' CCTV cameras. When you do slip off to the park for an occasional meet-up with friends, hide your wine in your yoga-class juice bottle. And if you smoke, bring your own ashtray.
