We have painted ourselves into a corner

By Bob Greene

A 28-year-old woman who recently moved to Chicago - she grew up in small-town Indiana - was faced with what she thought was a fairly simple task the other weekend:

She wanted to paint a lamp, and she wanted to do it with a can of spray paint.

So she went to a hardware store and asked on what shelf the spray paint was kept.

The man she asked told her that the spray paint was kept nowhere - that it is illegal to sell spray paint in the city of Chicago.

She was stunned. Illegal to sell spray paint?

Yes, the man said - the sale of spray paint has been outlawed for several years because young people tend to use it to write graffiti.

This struck the woman as being absurd - Chicagoans who want to use spray paint around the house can't buy it because some other people might use it for the wrong reasons? She went to talk to the manager of the hardware store about it.

He listened, and told her to wait in the back of the store. He sent an employee to the basement. In a few minutes, the employee came upstairs with a can of black spray paint. She was permitted to purchase it.

"I felt like I was buying drugs or something," she said.

The outlawing of spray-paint sales in Chicago is one more symbol of the concessions we are making in our seemingly neverending effort to hold back the forces of incivility. In some city neighborhoods where many citizens can't afford telephones, the much-needed pay phones have been removed so that drug dealers and prostitutes can't use them as offices.

Children aren't allowed to wear certain colors of clothing because they might be mistaken for gang members. We aren't doing so well at punishing the people who break the law - so, in desperation, we tighten the reins on the people who obey the law.

When, two years ago, the City of Chicago announced its intention to strictly enforce the no-spray-paint-sales ordinance, the corporation counsel explained:

"Graffiti is often a sign of deterioration in a community and has brought fear into neighborhoods by signaling the presence of gangs. The enforcement of this ordinance will give people a new weapon to fight graffiti."

And rob them of a weapon to paint lamps.

To check on just how big a menace to American society spray paint is, we conducted a random survey of hardware stores in towns much smaller than Chicago. It turns out that - what a surprise - the spray paint itself evidently isn't the enemy. In the smaller towns, no one has any trouble with spray paint.

Brian McMullen, who works at Erb Lumber in Paw Paw, Mich., said that his store sells spray paint to anyone who wants it. "This is a really small town, and there's virtually no graffiti around here," he said.

At Seymour Ace Hardware in Seymour, Ind., Chad Hageman said, "You can be 3 years old probably and buy spray paint around here." The citizens of Seymour, he said, use spray paint to paint things, not to deface things.

In Oskaloosa, Kan., high school seniors have a tradition of painting their names in the street at the end of their senior year, according to Sam Harvey, owner of Harvey's True Value Hardware in that town. "But they have a designated area for it, just south of the school, so it's OK," he said. He sells spray paint to anyone in town who wants it. "I don't think there's a problem," he said - and spray paint is a legal product in Oskaloosa.

Do they sell spray paint at Ace Hardware in Cadillac, Mich.? "We sure do," said Bill Knitter. "This is a community of about 10,000 people, and it's still pretty rural up here. People of all ages purchase spray paint."

In Madison, Ohio, Stacy Cherniss, manager of Western Reserve True Value, said, "We sell spray paint to anyone. There are no laws in this area against selling spray paint."

But there is in Chicago. So if you're a law-abiding citizen who has decided to make his or her home in Chicago, get out your paint brush and forget about spraying - unless you sneak the spray can in from some other community. If you believe that guns don't shoot people, people shoot people, then you ought to also realize that spray paint doesn't act idiotic. People act ...

Oh, forget it.

Chicago Tribune