Atomictumor

Well, it came and went, and now its coming again.

Judical candidate David Stuart, along with two commish candidates, all hoping to unseat incumbents (in the land of the perpetual incumbent) are throwing down lawsuits against the election commishion.

Now, I came down pretty harshly on ol’ Dave in a previous post, and got jumped by everybody and their brother in the comments section, but I still feel that an election, much like a marriage, is a line in the sand. Now, I’ll be the first to say that that’s principle talking, and not reality. In real life, marriages don’t work out, and elections don’t run smoothly. A lot of people are coming saying they felt disenfranchised by this last voting run, and the fact that there were hour plus long lines in an election where far less than half the citizens voted, well, thats not too cool.

So, yes, lets hang the election commission for as much as they deserve for not having things on the ball. Apparently the fancy new electronic voting system that Tennessee mandated is taking too long. True, it took me several minutes to write in A. Tom Ictuma on all of the campaign slots that I felt necessary, but thats the way it is. We’ve moved past the days of being able to work on paper, and we have to man up to this uncertain electronic age that we’re entering.

Again, I digress.

The thing is, I’d love to see Stuart win, so I’ll be backing him, again. I don’t have a pony in the district commish races, but those seem more justifed due to the tiny vote margin. My beef with the situation, is if each election has to be decided in courts, what does that say about our electoral system? Sure, we can bitch all day about the Presidential election system, and how using electoral votes as a sort of proxy is idiotic and archaic, but when we’re talking about our local stuff, our neighbors, its a different story.

I’d like to think we can run our own elections down this way without judicial oversight.

Now, everybody jump in and yell at me.

Eaves makes a good point in a previous post about how parents, and really, the city at large are ultimately responsible for ensuring that everybody gets home from school safely.  Right now, that issue is largely being ignored in favor of finger pointing at who’s at fault (council, school board, transportation dept, martians, etc).

I know its an Oak Ridge pastime, especially around politics season, to bitch about how dumb the other guys are, and lord knows I’m guilty of it myself, but its time we grew up and started getting proactive toward finding a solution, so thats what this post is for.

Heres what I would like to see:

• A group of citizens who are willing to donate their time and, if necessary, other resources toward making sure that nothing nasty happens this year.
• A central point of contact for all of Oak Ridge who will be coordinating these efforts, to make sure that we have universal blanket coverage for all the schools (i.e. if a particular PTO isn’t willing to step up, we’ll have people who can fill in).  Again, this isn’t for finger pointing, this is for making sure that kids are safe.
• What the police are doing to assist.  We’ll need traffic support.  Right now, at Willowbrook at 3:30 traffic is backed up to Robertsville Rd.  Thats a good stretch of land that is blocked by a line of cars waiting to get into Willowbrook, and lots of people are going to be passing in the left lane.  We need to make sure thats safe.  I can see worse problems at Woodland and Glenwood, because of the traffic and landscape.
• Ultimately, what I’d like to see out of this is a group of people who are willing to stand up in front of council (and whoever else) in favor of schools.  Dammit, I moved here so my kids could go to school in Oak Ridge.  I want the politicans in town to recognize that fact.  We have too many people here complaining about the school board getting “blank checks” and knowing absolutely nothing about what is needed to run a top rate school system.
  These people are the voices that the politicians here hear most often.  We need to make sure they hear voices in support of schools.  Theres a lot of em on this page, but I don’t think very many council members hang out here.

If we can organize, we can win.  Yes, it’ll take some dedication, and yes, it’ll be a thankless, pain in the ass job, but thats what we have to do, because nobody else appears interested in doing it for us.

Anybody got any thoughts?   Lets keep it in this thread.