Rules Is Rules

Every afternoon, five days a week, 20-year-old cancer patient Courtney Clevenger

goes to Lutheran Hospital [in Fort Wayne, IN] for radiation treatment, parks in one of the handicapped spots and goes inside. When she comes out, she’s drained. She goes home, goes to bed early and gets up the next day in time to go to her next treatment.

Clevenger has a handicapped sticker she got from Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne. But city parking officials in Fort Wayne refuse to recognize it, so Clevenger and other patients are getting tickets for parking in handicapped spots when they arrive at the hospital to undergo the energy-sapping radiation or chemo treatment. Reports the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette:

Of course, it hasn’t always been that way. Since the hospital opened in 1992, patients have been parking in the handicapped spots. Hospital security monitored the spots and let patients park there. It’s easy to spot people on chemo and radiation. They’re the ones who are completely bald. But in January, the land where the hospital is located was annexed into the city. Suddenly, hospital security no longer had control over the parking lot. Now, city parking control officers are in charge, and they’re finding easy targets.

The hospital has tried to intervene on behalf of its patients, but to no avail. “We actually went to the city … and were told flat no, it’s an ordinance,” explained the president and CEO of the hospital.

Ah yes, rules is rules. They must be applied blindly, without engaging the brain or the heart, because that's the only way callous, greedy pencil pushers know how.

[Via the excellent thenewspaper.com, a journal of the politics of driving]