...Write Myself a Letter

I'm gonna sit right down and write myself a letter
And make believe it came from you*

The Comments Department has been busy lately. Unfortunately, the comments are repetitive, kind of stuck in a rut. Our anonymous commenter could do a lot better than playing gotcha. Anonymous could focus on the main issue, the one chance, before the relationship with the public is poisoned and the whole thing goes up for grabs.

But A. would rather pretend there are no issues of importance before us; there's no budget deception, there's no new school proposal (actually, there really isn't much out there, is there?) headed for failure, there's no lack of trust on the part of the public. The only thing on A.'s mind is an odd preoccupation with yours truly!

Instead A. would rather pretend that all past failures are the responsibility of the writers of this site. Would it solve anything if that were true? If so, put it all on us. We accept responsibilty for all the faults and all the failures and everything that's wrong. We did it! Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

Okay. Now that we've got that out of the way, let's move on. No, wait. The other sin of which we are guilty, apparently, is in pointing out that those we've entrusted important matters to are, well, incompetent! That we should somehow then imply that they lack judgement may be unforgivable, at least to A.

Do we still have a right to voice our opinions? Or did we somehow give up that right? Have we lost our right to speak? And is the present inertia and incompetence and corruption somehow justified by past inertia and incompetence and corruption? If so, there's no hope that anything will change! That would truly be shocking and depressing.

We think we do have a right to speak, this being America, after all. We claim no special authority. We don't tell everything we know. We work with information out there in the public realm.

So let's start with a clean slate in the here and now. What needs to happen? Does the public need information? Is there a possibilty of discussion?

Let's talk about the basics. As an example, probably not one person in a hundred has any idea what's on the agenda for Wednesday's meeting. Is it really so difficult to put the agenda up on the District web site in a timely fashion? What does it mean that after repeated criticism on this kind of issue there's no movement to modify "business as usual"? I guess we're left to draw our own conclusions. Clearly, informing the public is not a "value" in this organization.

The budget and its accompanying flyer contain inaccuracies that look an awful lot like deliberate deceptions. At the Informational Meeting and in the days afterward there was an opportunity to adjust and explain and correct. It wasn't taken. Foolishly, it wasn't taken. Finally, after seeing that the District was not going to address these questions, we wrote this piece (and this, this, and this).

We're going to continue to ask questions. We're going to continue to point out discrepencies. We're going to write in plain English that everyone, we hope (all but the deliberately obtuse), can understand.

Most people aren't interested in "gotcha," but they are interested in real life adult concerns: taxes, value for money spent, and fairness for all children, to name a few. As long as those concerns aren't addressed in an open and substantive manner, we'll be here.

* The authorship of many songs is "anonymous" in the sense that the work may have had no single "author," but was developed over time through the "folk process." This particular work, "I'm Going to Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter, " is not anonymous! It was made famous first by Fats Waller, but the lyrics were written by Joe Young and are set to music by Fred Ahlert. They were undoubtedly proud of their work and signed it; they didn't take it from someone else and call it their own!