Note: This column first appeared Thursday in the Our North County editions of the newspaper.
Before we pardon the dirty bird, consider this:
Dissent is, by its nature, confrontational. If political protest doesn't get a critical rise out of a mass of citizens, it's not doing its job.
The whole object is to upset the status quo, an enterprise that tends to rhetorically raise the middle fingers of those who strongly disagree – and the thumbs of those who strongly agree.
If protesters exercise their First Amendment rights in public places like roads, they must expect others to exercise theirs. They must assume the risks that go with the windblown territory. Insults and obscene gestures will be hurled from passing vehicles.
Given that rude setting, what kind of physical protection does the Constitution guarantee roadside protesters?
Or stated another way, when does aggressive dissent against dissent cross the line into a crime?
That, as they say, is a bird of a different feather.
Two weeks ago, a small group of war protesters assembled on a shoulder near state Route 67 and Dye Road.
For months, Ramona's roadside critics of the Iraq war have endured epithets and obscene gestures from passing vehicles.
“We get that a lot,” said Dave Patterson, past president of the local chapter of Veterans For Peace.
To his credit, the Ramona dissident has no problem with harsh words or gestures. That's spar for the course, so to speak.
But Patterson does have a serious problem with what happened on a recent Friday night.
Keith Alan Davis, the driver of a Chevrolet pickup, swerved off the road and, driving close to the protesters, knocked over a couple of the anti-war signs, witnesses said.
Adding insult to the plausible threat of injury, Davis gave the finger to the demonstrators before driving away, witnesses said.
“He wanted to look each one of the protesters in the face and tell them what he thought of them,” according to the police report.
Across the street, getting an eyeful, was Robert Dobson, a lone pro-war demonstrator exercising his First Amendment right to disagree with Patterson's group.
As Davis, a Ramona resident, steered back onto Route 67, he graced Dobson with a wide smile of solidarity and the thumbs-up signal.
The authentic hero in this story, Dobson didn't let his political agreement with Davis trump his outrage at what he saw as an un-American attempt to intimidate the war protesters. In America, Dobson said, “we don't attack people” with whom we disagree.
In his statement, Dobson confirmed that the war protesters were forced to scatter as Davis drove by at about 25 or 30 mph.
“It scared the hell out of people,” Patterson told me. “We had one woman feeling faint.”
As for Davis, he appears to be dismissing the whole episode as much ado about very little. He suggested to a reporter that the America-hating protesters should leave the country. He believes the demonstrators, by complaining to sheriff's deputies, were inhibiting his First Amendment right to express his view of patriotism.
As for posing a threat, Davis says he was driving between 3 and 5 mph and didn't remember hitting any signs.
The actual speed of his detour is a matter of dispute.
Davis' son, who was a passenger, told deputies his father was driving between 10 and 15 mph – and said he believes their truck hit two signs.
It's overwrought to consider the Ramona swerve and finger-flipping as “an act of domestic terrorism,” as Patterson describes it.
Don't worry. Davis won't be shipped to Gitmo.
The District Attorney's Office is deciding if Davis should be charged with a misdemeanor. The Sheriff's Department investigated the incident as a possible disorderly conduct exacerbated by “offensive words in a public place,” an apparent reference to the finger gesture.
It's hard to imagine the district attorney focusing on Davis' upraised digit.
The finger – or the digitus impudicus of antiquity – is protected speech, said David Blair-Loy, legal director of the local American Civil Liberties Union.
In the real world, the Ramona war protesters should expect to be confronted with that classic shorthand for strenuous disagreement.
When Davis elected to turn his wheel, however, he was potentially violating a sacred halo, a reasonable zone of physical safety, that the Constitution hands out to every lawful protester.
The bird? Forget the bird.
The halo is where the district attorney's finger should point.
Logan Jenkins: (760) 737-7555;
logan.jenkins@uniontrib.com.
