| Thoburn
Case Goes Global |
| News flashes are ripping through the English countryside. |
| People in New Zealand are incensed. |
| Nice guys from Switzerland to Calgary, from Texas to Toledo,
can't believe their ears. |
| Yes, Fairfax County has jailed the owner of a golf course
for not planting trees. |
| This is, of course, an over-simplification of the issues
at hand, but the national media has picked up on the story
of John Thoburn and this week there has been no limit to the
letters to the editor sent to The Observer and votes cast
on the weekly poll at www.observernews.com. |
| Thoburn, the owner of a driving range on Hunter Mill Road
just on the edge of Reston, has failed, so the courts say,
to do the things he said he'd do when the county gave him
permission to open his business. |
| That permission was granted in 1993, and since then it seems
Fairfax County and Thoburn have had massive communication
problems. Or maybe it's just that simple: John doesn't want
to plant the trees. |
| Anyway, thanks to a link from Thoburn's supporters at www.freejohnthoburn.com,
The Observer's online poll by Tuesday evening had received
1,186 votes, with 90.1 percent of respondents voting "Yes"
to the question "Should John Thoburn be released from
jail?" |
| And the e-mail poured in over the weekend. On Monday alone
The Observer received more than 100 messages about Thoburn,
almost all of them from out of state, and all but about five
or six saying that it is ridiculous, and practically criminal,
to keep Thoburn locked up. |
| Obscenities were flying around by the bucket-full. |
| Eleven-year-old girls were writing poems about property
rights. |
| People from Oregon were writing in about The Case of The
Blueberry Cafe and some guy from Switzerland related a story
about a neighbor who installed the wrong color tiles on the
roof of his house. |
| "Free John" bumper stickers appear on cars with
Delaware license plates. |
| All the anti-government, pro-privacy wackos in the nation
have been writing in, with what would appear to be information
from only one side of the issue, to say that this is just
another example of government intruding into the private life
of an American citizen. |
| Some people equated the Thoburn case to the Supreme Court
ruling that it was legal for a Texas police officer to handcuff
and arrest a woman in front of her children for not wearing
her seat belt. The people in the government, the writers said,
have over-stepped their bounds. |
| E-mail chain letters were floating about, with words at
the top encouraging people to forward it on to help "Free
John." |
| One writer called the jailing of Thoburn an act of "Communism,"
and another referred to "The Fairfax Hillbillies." |
| But one of the writers who supported the jailing of Thoburn
had a good point: What is society to do when people violate
the law? |
| Sure, it's a minor law. Most of the writers pointed out
the irony of spending taxpayer money to keep in jail a man
who won't plant trees, while hardened, violent criminals are
on the streets. |
| But it's still a law. If the government is powerless to
enforce any of the codes the people have previously approved
as law, then eventually the whole idea of organized land use
planning would be gone. |
| Anybody could open a gas station right next to a $350,000
house, and the government couldn't stop it. |
| It wouldn't be possible to publish all the letters we received
this week about John Thoburn, but excerpts from the letters
begin on Page 9. Two letters, written by Observer readers,
appear in their entirety. |
