Lost in Seattle

When someone tries to hand me out a flyer, it’s kinda like they’re saying, “Here — you throw this away.” — Mitch Hedberg

Today, as I approached the vast campus green that separated me from meetings #4 and #5 of the day, I saw that the landscape was littered with student activists of one flavor or another each armed with a stack of flyers. Oh boy, I thought, I’m going to have to get my firm “No thank yous!” on for this trek.

I have a standing policy to not take flyers from people on the street because I have never, ever been handed anything that I found even remotely interesting. So, I pointed my eyes directly ahead of me and steeled myself against the impending onslaught of sloganeering and paper-waving.

But the expected deluge of harassment never occurred. I made it past one, two, three, even four earnest-looking undergraduates who simply stood idly by clutching their papers and keeping out of my way. As I neared the opposite end of the lawn, I even started to make eye contact with some of them, but to no avail. By the end of my sojourn, I began to feel outraged that I hadn’t had some piece of propaganda forced into my hand by a politically-charged co-ed. It was as if they were waiting for people to come up to them to request a flyer.

Maybe it’s the whole “Seattle Nice” thing — our local euphemism for extreme passivity and social awkwardness. This tendency is, of course, counter-productive to the act of distributing flyers, which requires the pamphleteer to aggressively engage with people who generally want to avoid them. Indeed, I saw not one flyer get distributed to passers-by this afternoon despite fairly heavy foot traffic on the green.

The student organizations here need to hire a team of consultants to train them on the art of aggressive flyering. If they asked me, I’d direct them to the Detroit order of the Gideons.

The Gideons who stalked the campus of my alma mater, Wayne State University, were seasoned professionals. On Gideon Day, there wasn’t a hand on campus without a small green copy of the New Testament, and the garbage cans overflowed with the Word of the Lord.

They worked in teams of three and staked out the pedestrian exits of the parking garages. As you emerged, you’d see two of them, off to one side, clad in nondescript suits and wearing calming, angelic smiles. Naturally, you’d turn the other way to avoid them. But, like velociraptors, the Gideons you’d see weren’t the ones you had to look out for. Suddently, whooosh out of nowhere, another one would swoop in and, before you knew what had hit you, you’d be clutching a little bible.