Grandfather David McCarty’s one-man sit-in became, in the words of columnist Byron Crawford, a corporate version of Joe vs. the Volcano, or maybe Appalachian State vs. Michigan. You don’t mess with a man tending the tomatoes in his back yard.

If you’ve ever waited in long lines at Wal-Marts where only six of their 25 checkout lanes were open, or stood in a checkout line for 15 minutes only to have a bored clerk greet you with news that he or she is going on break and that a replacement checkout clerk has not shown up, McCarty’s enough-is-enough last stand may be just what the doctor ordered — assuming your doctor is an anger management specialist.

While the dynamite was still undetonated only a few feet away, McCarty did a little exploding of his own in newspaper interviews and on network television and radio shows.

“I was already out here with my granddaughter — picking tomatoes yesterday afternoon,” McCarty said by phone from his lawn chair yesterday. “My garden is right up against this back fence. And they told me, not in a nice way, ‘You’ve got to do it. You go get in the house.’

“They’d done that to me once or twice before and it kind of got to me this time,” he said. “I told them I was on my property and I didn’t have to go anywhere. I’ve eat dirt, and I’ve been blasted. This has all been going on around me now for four months.”

Even being able to walk through your back yard to buy cheap plastic crap from China isn’t a good enough reason to put up with that.

Jeff Hess: Have Coffee Will Write.

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This entry was posted on Friday, October 5th, 2007 at 2020 by Jeff Hess and is filed under Citizen Groups. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.