Tis the season when I can go eat my lunch out side,
and my eyes itch.
It’s when we can open the windows in the house and let fresh air in,
and I sneeze.
I can roll down the windows in my truck,
and never hear the radio till late September.
Ah, spring fever.
Well, thanks to the efforts of Citizens Oak Ridge, using an argument that essentially boils down to:
a): I don’t want a Target in Oak Ridge, regardless of the good it’ll do the town, and
b): I don’t want to put anything on that hill that some rat bastard clear cut a few years ago just to teach everybody a lesson
they have apparently gathered the necessary signatures to force a referendum on the Pine Ridge development gig.
Now, if there’s two things I don’t like, it’d be government and corporations. I find it ironic that I’m so behind our city government being a ‘big boy’ and making this financial decision by itself. Maybe its because I’ve grown apathetic in my old age and would just like a local place to buy color coordinated posh-ish furnishings, or maybe its because I’ve finally gotten used to the idea that America (and, by extension, Oak Ridge, whether you believe it or not) is a “representative democracy“, which means that we elect members of our populace to make all these big decisions because we, the people, are too busy watching American Idol and driving the kids to school to vote on every matter which appears.
Which really makes my life easier. I mean, think about it, no workshops with lobbyists, no late night meetings with other towns to make sure we all have similar laws, no catching up on all the various and sundry bits of information needed to run a town.
I mean, how much worse would it be if EVERY little decision was influenced by weird, bible thumping door to door peddlers, and every single peon voted on something based on a one or two line statement at the top of a petition page, vaguely disguised as “attempting to put more complete information and analyses into the hands of Oak Ridgers”
I’m glad that our system of government means that I pay people to do all this work for me. People who study all the financial data going into, say, a proposed retail development, and can reasonably say whether or not it would be a feasible thing. Sure, they make mistakes, and sometimes wind up dealing with douchebags, but it seems like overall they’d have the intelligence and savvy to be able to tell you which way the wind is blowing with regards to these matters. I mean, getting the people in means that you’re going to wind up dealing with a few thousand people, interrupted from their America Idol and alcohol, listening to bible thumping peddlers with dubious, agenda pushing information, and then crap would never get done, and I’d never be able to buy color coordinated whatsis from a place in this dumb little town again.
And that’d be a shame.