Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will see scattered flurries with a bit of morning snow and a high of 33. Sunrise is 7:13 AM and sunset 5:01 PM for 9h 48m 32s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 38.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1776, Henry Knox‘s “noble train of artillery” to transport heavy weaponry that had been captured at Fort Ticonderoga arrives for the Continental Army outside Boston.
One of our sons lives in Seattle, and so we read the Seattle Times. That newspaper yesterday described the days when the sun sets before 5 PM as the ‘Big Dark.’ The Big Dark is now ending for Seattle, as a measure of daylight, and also for Whitewater, of course.
There is in beautiful, small-town Whitewater another kind of Big Dark that does not end: secretive government. At both the local development authority and the school district, policy decisions, hiring and firing, transfers of employees, etc. are made with little or no public notice.
Public policies, public officials, public cost: treated often as private matters, kept from view with false (but self-serving) justifications of confidentiality and privacy. Almost all of this comes from non-lawyers who wrongly claim they are under a legal duty to remain silent. They often point to advice they’ve received from lawyers who are all-too-willing to flatter local officials with the notion that those local officials have ‘special’ responsibilities that trump the public’s right to know. (Lawyers like this know what they’re doing: they’re not delivering the law, they’re flattering board members’ own self-importance.)
Left, center, right, libertarian, etc.: they all come in talking about the public, but most of them are co-opted into a closed-door, closed-session mentality within a few months. They come in open-government men and women, but they become if-you-only-knew-what-I can’t-tell-you types within half a year or so. While they may contend they’re learned new insights, the greater truth is that they’ve shed prior principles.
It’s as though they go to bed as one person, and then awake as another, looking the same yet in substance becoming something different:
So little it takes in Whitewater, even less than an alien pod in a science fiction movie, to turn someone into someone else. A few flattering words, an assignment on a committee, and adults become obsequious children.
Candidates are understandably eager for office — while a few in this town are excitedly marking how many there are (And Then There Were 12!, And Then There 11!, etc.) — but it’s how officeholders perform over time that matters.
The successful among these candidates should be careful about going to bed, as they might find themselves unfortunately transformed by the next morning.
Uber Eats Delivery Interrupts College Basketball Game:
funny because it’s true!
Remarkably strong mental imagery for a point that need be considered by many.
Thank you — inspiration courtesy of director Don Siegel and producer Walter Wanger, 1956.