| Our cities need more traffic mimes |
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| Wednesday, 02 February 2005 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Tag it:           One of the things our cities need is more traffic mimes. (I say this knowing that mimes are not universally loved.) My one and only experience with miming was in the streets of a small town somewhere in Washington state. A small family came out of the bagel shop in front of me. Instead of encouraging the young boy to put loose change into my worn out paper cup, the parents looked at me, surprised as I climbed my invisible rope and pushed against the invisible wall between us, and then they said to their son, "Shoot the mime!"He lifted his plastic gun with an enormous grin on his face, popped a few caps in me and then skipped away beside his parents, leaving me to slowly and silently die in the gutter. That is not, you may have guessed, why I think we need more traffic mimes. I was reading recently in the VG-R Project and they put me on to this article about former Bogot? Mayor Antanas Mockus. When Mockus was elected, the city of Bogot? was descending into madness and anarchy. Traffic mimes were one of his unique solutions to promote civic engagement, in this case to combat (by mockery) dangerous drivers and pedestrians who disobeyed the rules. ("'It was a pacifist counterweight,' Mockus said. 'With neither words nor weapons, the mimes were doubly unarmed. My goal was to show the importance of cultural regulations.'") The point is not the mimes per se, but the creative thinking and new ideas behind them. (Read the article for other examples of Mockus' creative approach to mayorhood on topics ranging from water conservation to the sacredness of life). What we really need are leaders who communicate "through symbols, humor, and metaphors" instead of dried up politic-speak, leaders who can create fresh and innovative ideas to educate instead of leaning so heavily on the party line and the status quo. {moscomment}
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