The world’s so damn loud we can’t even hear ourselves complain!
BACKGROUND
The 20th century was by far the loudest hundred years in human history. Since the Industrial Age took full swing in the late 1800s, life has become louder and louder. Very little has been done to curb noise pollution, despite overwhelming evidence that prolonged exposure to excessive auditory stimuli adversely affects learning abilities, concentration, and stress levels in humans and even in wildlife. Without any real support from state or federal governments, some local municipalities have come up with their own noise-violation procedures. Some examples:
In Uncle John’s Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader, we reported about Paul Sacco, a Colorado judge who sentenced teen noise violators to a few hours of listening to Barry Manilow music. In 2009 Sacco expanded his catalog of music-as-punishment to include the Barney theme song and an hour-long marathon of the Styx song “Come Sail Away” as sung by South Park’s Eric Cartman. The tactic may be catching on. When a Miami Beach driver was caught blasting 50 Cent in his Jaguar at 5:00 a.m., Judge Jeffrey Swartz sentenced him to two hours of the Verdi opera La Traviata. (Reportedly, it turned the offender into an opera fan.)
There are very few problems dire enough to make citizens volunteer to pay a tax increase to get them fixed, but that’s exactly what happened in a neighborhood of Vancouver, Washington. Residents got tired of the loud train whistles that blew every time a locomotive came through. “You can’t even talk on the phone,” said one local. So they asked the city government to erect barriers to keep cars off the tracks when the trains are coming—thereby eliminating the need for the whistles. Officials said no; they didn’t have the $1 million it would cost. “Fine,” said the residents, “Then we’ll pay for it. Raise our property taxes. That whistle is driving us crazy.”
The Japanese have a theory that beauty is imperfect and changeable. It’s called wabi-sabi.
The residents of a Phoenix, Arizona, neighborhood complained to city officials about the bells of Cathedral of Christ the King Church. They chimed on the hour, every hour, every day, every week. “It makes us feel like captives in our own homes,” said one citizen. Officials finally put an end to the siege: They took the church’s bishop, Rick Painter, to court, where he was sentenced to probation. From now on, if the church bells ring on any day but Sunday, the church will be fined and the bishop will go to jail.
It wasn’t the bonfire in her yard that prompted Brenna Barney’s neighbors in Waukesha, Wisconsin, to call the cops—it was her incessant chanting. Barney is a practicing Wiccan, and she was performing elaborate rituals “in celebration of the New Moon.” When the police arrived, Barney fought back (which led to a resisting-arrest charge), arguing that they were violating her religious rights. The cops disagreed. So did her neighbor, Vicki Denova, who defended the 911 call: “To be honest, your choice is your choice as long as you’re not affecting other people.”
In the middle of the night in May 2009, Marsha Coleman of Salem, Oregon, couldn’t sleep because of the loud party going on next door. So she went over and asked the neighbors to please keep it down. Bad move: After she got back home, some of the drunken revelers showed up on her porch and banged repeatedly on her door. Frightened, she called 911. A deputy rushed to Coleman’s house and was in the middle of taking her statement when they heard another series of loud knocks on the door. Then they heard a slurring voice yell, “This is the Marion County Sheriff!” The deputy opened the door and found one of the partiers, 32-year-old David Bueno, whose party ended right there, as he was arrested for impersonating an officer and disturbing the peace.
For more people and machines driving us crazy with their incessant noise, cover your ears and head over to page 409.
When an earthquake hit LA in July 2008, the first “news outlet” to report it was Twitter.