Double Flee A

Dear Dale

I've got a problem. It burns when I pee. Just kidding. There's a table where I work which someone keeps placing pro-life flyers on. It's a table that they use as a security desk at night, but in the daytime it just gets pushed aside, so it's not really "for" anything, but it's very visible and therefore useful for putting flyers on. I'm not talking pro-life like "don't abort because a baby is cute and this and that", but pro-life like "euthanasia is wrong".

If, as a right-to-die proponent, I vehemently disagree with that flyer's opinion, is it ethical for me to remove it from the table? I ask because I think the ethical thing to do is to ignore it and let it be, and beyond that the most I should do if I disagree with it is to make a "right-to-die" flyer and set it next to it. But come on, I can't spend all day making and distributing flyers. I've got other things to do.

An easy way of deciding would be to determine if it is unethical in the first place for that flyer to be placed there. Unfortunately, that table is "for" whatever it's used as, not a publicly owned space where it's illegal to post signage.

Can I get rid of that stupid flyer? I think I should, because if my arbitrary opinions were set out there, the other guy would probably get rid of that, right?

Thanks, Dale. You're the cherry on top.

---- Somebody


Somebody, that's a great question, and you've thought it out pretty well. You spent too long worrying about the table though, and in the time it took you to write that letter to me, you could have whipped up a rockin' brochure. Get a decent image editing program and learn to use it. Make and email the finished product to yourself and do what I do, use your office printer and copier to make a zillion of them, half of which you then throw away because you hate your lousy job. Instead of making tit-for-tat crap, though, make flyers promoting my blog for its unique and valuable perspective on our modern world, because nobody looks at it. Because it's total crap. Better that you spend our time doing that than worrying about that dumb-ass flyer. You've got as much right to get rid of it as anybody does to put it there.

Later,
Dale.

posted by dale @ 6:44 PM