Health Ranger interviews Julie Bass - all charges dropped against Michigan gardener

Sunday, July 31, 2011 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: Julie Bass, guerilla gardening, health news

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(NaturalNews) Thanks to the help of NaturalNews readers and the alternative media, Julie Bass has achieved victory against the Oak Park, Michigan city planner's office that threatened to throw her in jail for 93 days for the "crime" of growing cucumbers and tomatoes in her front yard. All charges have been dismissed, but it turns out the city council may now be plotting to put even more draconian rules in place in the fall of this year.

I spoke by phone with Julie and asked her to share how the charges were dismissed, what allowed her to prevail in the case, and what she plans to do from here forward. My full interview with Julie is available right now at:
http://soundcloud.com/naturalnews/interview-...

Some of the highlights of the interview:

"The city council recently suggested they should make a rule that everyone in Oak Park now has to run every single landscaping decision by the city council before they can do it. They've just reacted time and time again by digging in their heels and getting more draconian and trying to make even more absurd statements." - Julie Bass

Alternative media helps Julie Bass achieve victory

In this interview, I asked Julie what role the alternative media (like NaturalNews, InfoWars and the Robert Scott Bell show) played in helping her achieve the dismissal of her charges. She said our public support for her case was essentially the primary reason why the charges were dropped:

"I think that if they didn't know there were so many eyes on them to do the right thing, I think it would have been really tempting to just have it be another citizen that they squashed down and put in her place. If no one was paying attention, it would have been so easy for them to just ride roughshod over us and give us all kinds of consequences and make up all kinds of other rules. I think it's 100 percent responsible that there was so much public scrutiny on this one, so we appreciated that... more than we can even say," said Julie.

Listen to the full interview at:
http://soundcloud.com/naturalnews/interview-...

Julie learns how even local Big Government can be tyrannical

I also asked Julie what she learned about standing up against local tyranny

"I never really realized how involved in your life the city government could get. I never realized it would turn into this beast that could persecute you and be very shameless in their desire to basically squash you like a bug," she said.

"This was just a really eye-opening experience about how many things the government does that fly under the radar, that no one pays attention, no one thinks it will ever affect me ... so I think this is a good wakeup call for us to just pay attention, and be more aware, and don't fall asleep at the switch or they'll run stuff by you that you'll just wake up with your jar hanging open, like oh my God what happened?"

"I hope it really does have a positive effect on government, to remind them that they are accountable to the people they work for. And to remind people that you can stand up. You can stand your ground. I'm glad that I didn't back down. I'm glad that I can show other people that you can just be a regular stay-at-home mom, but yet I was able to make my feelings carry some weight," she added.

Highlights of the backlash

Julie told me she also really enjoyed the comedy video skit I created that poked fun at the Oak Park city planner's office. You can watch that hilarious Monty Python-style animation satire at:
http://www.naturalnews.tv/v.asp?v=3A4B88066D...

"It took a lot of stress off during a really hard time," Julie told me. Laughter is the best medicine, after all.

Some other details that emerged from my conversation with Julie:

• For an entire week after Kevin Rulkowski said on TV (twice) that the definition of "suitable" is "common," the website Websters.com reported that the most frequently searched word definition on their dictionary website was "suitable."

• There was a campaign organized to mail dictionaries to the city of Oak Park, Michigan so that the word-challenged bureaucrats there could see for themselves the definition of the word "suitable."

• The Judge of her case in Oak Park was very fair and took a considerable amount of time to understand the charges and determine the real story of what had happened.

Once again, listen to the full interview with Julie Bass at:
http://soundcloud.com/naturalnews/interview-...

... and watch the hilarious satire video at:
http://www.naturalnews.tv/v.asp?v=3A4B88066D...

Yes, I did the character voice for the Kevin character. I do quite a few comedy character voices, including the voices in this hilarious skit called "General Mills Mind Games" at:
http://www.naturalnews.tv/v.asp?v=851519FA1A...