Letters to the emperor

I am currently reading the book “The Letters of Pliny The Younger” and have reached Book X (=10 to those who weren’t paying attention in history class). This section comprises of some of Pliny’s letters to the Emperor Trajan and the replies he received. In many of them Pliny seeks advice about how to deal with certain situations in his job as Governer of Bithynia – a province which had previously suffered from corruption and poor administration.

Trajan was a very “approachable” emperor, even for common people when they needed his help. This led to one of the happier and more peaceful times of the Roman Empire. A couple of these letters can be read here (in English) (though the book has many more).

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/pliny-trajan1.html

Now, here in Switzerland we have a similar system concerning the approachability of those “in power”. I remember many years ago when we turned down the offer of having cable TV (even though the cable runs through our land) because we felt that satellite TV was preferable for us (more freedom of choice) and had a 1,5m dish on our roof (the first private dish in Canton Berne as it happens).

Once the cable TV system was up and running our local (village) administration sent a letter to everyone telling them that external antennas has to be removed by a certain date – most people didn’t need them any more anyway. But we did. So I wrote to them and said we still needed our Swiss TV antenna and our dish, as we weren’t on their cable system. The letter was ignored. A month or so later we received a registered letter saying that our dish was to be taken down from our roof or they would send someone to forcibly remove it at our expense. Now, if our house was an ancient monument (it’s ancient but it ain’t no monument!) or in a historically protected or “listed” area, I could understand them, but it’s not. I called them and said again that we needed our dish because we’re not on their cable system, but they practically said “that’s your own fault” and “remove your dish or it will be removed”… The fact that they pulled the cable over our land, did a lot of damage to our land and never paid us a penny compensation didn’t matter to them.

So I called the National Government in Bern. Switzerland doesn’t have a king or a single president in the usual manner. We have – at the top of the chain of power – a group of seven people called the Bundesrat, who basically have the main power (apart from the people, when we vote by referendum on whether we agree with the Bundesrat wants to do). Anyway, I called Bern and immediately got through to the secretary of one of the most approachable and popular Bundesräte of his time – Willy Ritschard. She put me through to Mr. Ritschard Himself (and I didn’t even realise until half-way through the conversation that it WAS him.)

When he heard of our predicament he was furious and practically cursed petty local government politicians and, thanks to a letter signed by him on our behalf and sent to the chairman of our community government, they “decided” to allow us to keep our dish.

Mr Ritschard came to our aid yet again a couple of years later when our daughter, then 9 years old, was forbidden from riding her bicycle to school. Local school by-laws allowed only children over 11 from riding to school. I protested that a local government was not allowed to say who could or could not ride on National roads. They countered by saying that she would not be covered by the school’s insurance. I lobbed the ball back saying that Swiss law states that ALL children have to be insured by the school for their way to and from school, no matter whether they walked, rode, skated, or flew. And that if they are saying that their insurance did not cover our daughter, then they were breaking the law and I would do something about it. They ummed and aahhhed and then said that if she rode her bike to school, she would not be allowed to ride it on school grounds but would have to leave the bike elsewhere.. So Mr Ritschard again stepped in, told them not to be so petty and to allow our daughter, who lived at just over the “legal” distance of 1 km away, to ride her bike to school.

Things have changed in our village since then. You see kids who live only a few houses away, going to school on bikes, skates, skateboards and scooters and nobody is stopping them. Maybe Mr Ritschard and ourselves finally made them see how petty they were and change the rules.

So for me, it was rather like writing to the Emperor.