Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be windy with a high of 37. Sunrise is 6:38 and sunset is 5:38 for 10 hours 11 minutes of daytime. The moon is in its first quarter with 50.9 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Finance Committee meets at 5 PM.
On this day in 1803, in Marbury v. Madison, the Supreme Court establishes the principle of judicial review.
This libertarian blogger wrote yesterday that the Whitewater School Board’s 224-word cautionary statement before public comment during meetings will never not be funny. Those words are so obviously designed to produce a chilling effect; they are so evidently condescending toward the public from which the board members themselves are drawn. (We are, all of us, the same: neither higher nor lower, neither greater nor lesser. We are, all of us, ordinary people in a beautiful place.)
Five years of closed-government practices brought the district to this low place. This preface to public comment first appeared at board meetings only during the tenure of the last superintendent. Those who say that the past is behind us are wrong: it yet lingers and afflicts the present. See generally The Importance of Reviewing Past Policy Failures.
And yet, and yet, I’m struck by how dull, how pedestrian the board’s cautionary statement is. True belief usually brings exuberance and confidence.
When the Whitewater School Board delivers its cautionary words before public comment, those words are delivered without passion. The board, although wrong in its approach, doesn’t even try to advance its approach with enthusiasm.
How odd, how strange, that it now falls to someone who advocates an open-government position to demonstrate how a true devotion to this board’s own closed and cloistered position would sound. As I’ve no singing voice, I’ll call upon technology to overcome my musical deficiencies.
A genuine devotion of the board to its own stifling words would sound like this, and would be sung with conviction:
Click above to hear a suggested devotional rendition for the Whitewater School Board.
Far better still would be for the board to abandon its five-year descent into debilitating closed government, and return to an invigorating open-government position.