Too bad an acting coach was not on hand at last night’s City Council meeting.
I have a curiosity about how much truth leaked into the microphone.
I am not sure any of the 34 persons who protested the opening of a homeless shelter deserves a passing grade for what I suspect was slightly disingenuous testimony before the Council.
If only the girl on Bill O’Reilly’s Fox News show, who judges what people really intend by their body language, had been in Council Chambers.
My guess is that between 99 and 101 percent of the speakers are Nimbys. But they had to hide out as if they were Republicans on a college campus.
So many of them resorted to vague, meaningless terminology that only sounded authoritative. What does it mean to say “Upward Bound is a good organization, but the timing and the project are wrong?”
The timing? You can be more imaginative than that.
This was mechanically followed by, “I am not against the homeless. They can go someplace else in the same neighborhood.”
Where, pal?
Yeah, Team. We Love the Homeless
In pious lockstep, all speakers swore they were not against the homeless poisoning their lives and their neighborhood. Just move elsewhere, pal, not at the corner of West Washington and Beethoven. Oh, I see.
Last checked, Bill Clinton was not reserving suites at the homeless-to-be-site, the former SunBay Motel, when he sneaked into town to rendezvous with the anti-Hillary.
As a smart friend cracked this afternoon: “If the merchants and residents around that part of West Washington were truly desirous of improving the neighborhood, isn’t the pretty well controlled Upward Bound plan better than what was there before?”
I wonder if I wasn’t formerly married to one or two of those women who offered such creative excuses for opposing the presence of an Upward Bound shelter within throwing distance of their homes and their businesses.
Shouldn’t Somebody Confess?
If Lent has not started, does St. Augustine’s offer confessions on Tuesdays?
It is so unseemly to look your friends and neighbors in the eye and tell them what you really feel:
“I do not want any icky, sticky, gooey — and possibly crooked— homeless people infecting my family. Isn’t our neighborhood lousy enough already?”
Makes you sound like an unrepentant bigot. Or worse, a Republican.
I don’t know if the protestors were so carefully organized that they were scripted, or given talking points, before they walked to the microphone.
Do You Want Cookies or Homeless?
The experience reminded me of when I sat in the kitchen as a kid while Mom baked about 400 cookies.
All 400 of Mom’s cookies were identical. Of the 34 protestors who stepped up, after the first two or three spoke, every subsequent speaker sounded the same.
Why Mayor Alan Corlin allowed 81 people to voice a total of about three different opinions is a subject for another day.
Back in the old days, when Albert Vera was on the City Council and serious about it — not telling fantastic fairy tales about running just to take the heat off somebody — I recall that he handled this kind of mob the way Mr. Corlin should have.
The Vera Solution
Mr. Vera said, as I remember: Give me two or three speakers representing the pro side and the con side. Within minutes, the pain subsided.
That is how a representative democracy should be run, lots of oil and gas, go very light on the verbosity. We get enough of that from the dais every Monday.
Last night felt like a grammar school play.
Unless the protestors were rehearsing for out-of-town gigs, the dreariness of sitting through vaguely articulate people rubber-stamping each other is about as stimulating as listening to a liberal make up an even bigger whopper about global warming.