KNOX — In rush to judgment, parking vigilantes misfire

Jack Knox was born and raised in Kamloops, where he took his first driving lesson.

COLUMN — Another day, another case of misguided vigilante justice by the self-appointed Parking Police.

This one comes from Nova Scotia, where CBC reports a Halifax woman found this anonymous note on her car, which was parked in a spot designated for people with disabilities: “I HAVE A VIDEO OF YOU WALKING AWAY FROM YOUR CAR ON NUMEROUS OCCASIONS, YOU ARE NOT HANDICAPPED!! THE NEXT TIME YOU PARK HERE I WILL FORWARD THE VIDEO’S TO THE POLICE WITH YOUR LICENSE PLATE NUMBER. YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF YOURSELF!!!!”

Alas, while many of us can share the ALL-CAPS OUTRAGE!! directed at the self-entitled weasels who abuse handicapped-parking rules, the Halifax note-writer missed one important point: The driver in question has a prosthetic leg. She might not limp like Long John Silver, but she comes by her handicapped-parking permit legitimately.

Tammy Garrett can relate to this story. The Courtenay woman constantly has to deal with the self-righteous, albeit anonymous, condemnation of those who attack her without knowing all the facts.

Garrett, 44, is confined to a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down, a legacy of a 10-year, on-again, off-again battle with cancer in her spine.

Getting from the driver’s seat to the wheelchair from her side-loading van takes extra space. When no handicapped stall is available, or none is wide enough to load and unload her chair, she angle-parks across a couple of other spots. She says she tries to do so in the far reaches of the lot where no one else will be affected. “I don’t necessarily have to be close to where I’m going,” she said Friday. “I just need a big enough spot.”

Nonetheless, the sight of one vehicle taking up two spaces brings out the inner Charles Bronson in passersby. “I had one guy accost me at Walmart, knocking on the window,” she said. When Garrett brought her two kids to the pool (she’s a single mom) somebody scrawled a nasty message on the dust on the window.

She regularly finds herself vilified on social media sites dedicated to the shaming of drivers whose vehicles appear to have been parked by an earthquake. “I’m petrified that I have been on there a few times.” From Shit Parkers Of Victoria to Kazakhstan’s I Parked Like An Ass, such sites have blossomed in concert with the anonymous sniping of parking lot vigilantes. Unfortunately, they don’t always get it right.

Two weeks ago, at the Courtenay Airpark, a small facility with no handicapped stalls, Garrett found a mocked up “parking violation” under her windshield wiper. “This is not a ticket, but if it were in my power, you would receive two,” it read. “Because of your bull-headed, inconsiderate feeble attempt at parking, you have taken enough room for a 20-mule team, two elephants and a safari of pygmies from the African Interior.” The note continued on from there, but you get the drift.

Garrett is fed up. She appreciates that people get ticked off by the unchecked abuse of handicapped-parking rules, whether by those who simply ignore the signs or by family members who use dad’s handicapped pass even when he’s not in the car. But the disproportionate anger triggered by the sight of her angle-parked van is hard to swallow. “People get so bent out of shape about a parking space?”

If they want to feel hard done by, they should try living as a single mother fighting cancer from a wheelchair, she said. “Do you want to live this life? It’s not fun being handicapped. It’s not great.”

The lesson, whether in Nova Scotia or Courtenay, is that we should not to be so blinded by sanctimonious indignation that we leap to vengeance out of ignorance. There’s a reason Garrett must park as she does. The afflictions that strike those who are issued handicapped permits are not always obvious to the casual observer. Rather than speeding to judgment, we would be better to tap the brakes.

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