Take Your Depraved Business Someplace Else

I sit on my front porch on a warm summer’s evening watching the traffic on what should be a quiet residential street. Look, there goes another one, a dark green metallic pickup with Idaho plates making his sixth trip around the block, obviously looking for a prostitute. Coming from another direction is an expensive hometown car, an older man driving, making his fifth pass, trolling as well.

These two vehicles are numbers 15 and 16 on my ever-growing list of johns who have driven past my house in only the last half hour. Yesterday a young man parked across the street while a young lady performed oral sex right out in the open. The prostitution scene (not to mention the brisk drug traffic) in our East Central neighborhood is worse than it was last year. Of course, we have said the same thing each year for more than 10 years, and the problem escalates every year. The number I counted today during lunch (one hour) is about the same as I counted during an entire week last year.

Prostitution is a thriving, rampant, 24-hour business. Lights in the yard at night no longer make a difference; the whores, their johns and the drug dealer pimps only laugh at our efforts to scare them off. I have yelled at them - I’m not at all polite - to get out of the neighborhood. They argue and continue their business. Can we enforce the law to stop them? Too expensive, too much trouble, I hear.

Can we legalize and regulate the trade, get it out of the neighborhoods? Fat chance. Could we go out in frustration with automatic rifles and wipe them out (once a week sounds good)? Now that would give law enforcement and the judiciary something to get their teeth into. Unfortunately, that would make me the guilty party and not solve the initial problem.

While I wait for an answer and contain my temper, I address you who blatantly break the law and flaunt your sexual appetites in front of the rest of us, you who are trolling and copulating in my front yard. Why not consider taking the prostitutes into your neighborhood for a while, in front of your house, in front of your wife and children, in front of your friends. Put on a little exhibition for your neighbors. You seem to appreciate the public display and the prostitutes.

I’m sick of them and sick of you, too.

MEMO: Your Turn is a feature of the Wednesday and Saturday Opinion pages. To submit a Your Turn column for consideration, contact Rebecca Nappi at 459-5496 or Doug Floyd at 459-5466 or write Your Turn, The Spokesman-Review, P.O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210-1615.