This Is our Village

Saturday, December 28, 2013

A Response to "The Walls Come Tumbling Down" an opinion piece published in UCO Reporter- January, 2014 by Stewart Richland.




Mr. Richland, at about the halfway point of your 600 word essay, you (finally) expressed your two main ideas: that the ending of term limits for UCO officers was a mistake that you would like to see reversed, and that any future UCO votes on matters "critical to the welfare of our village" should require a ninety percent majority (or perhaps a ninety percent quorum) for passage.

The rest of your essay was about ostriches, Adolf Hitler, and your apparently sincere belief that anyone who disagrees with you is a "mind- bogglingly stupid", " low information reader" with "significantly smaller brain capacity than humans". Strong stuff, and maybe not the best way to sway public opinion.

Here is a piece of information from a " low information reader" with a "high information cellphone": ostriches do not "put their heads in the ground to escape predators" (ostriches.org, sandiegozoo.org, Wikipedia.org). Three minutes of Google fact-checking over your morning coffee would have shortened your essay by perhaps five hundred words. Resisting the urge to find novel ways to call people who disagree with you stupid would have further abbreviated (and sharpened) your point.

As a "teacher of history", I would have thought that you would have at least a passing interest in Government or Political Science. Requiring a ninety percent majority vote, in public or corporate government, would be paralyzing in effect. Just deciding what issues are "critical" enough to require this ultra-super majority would bring UCO business to a permanent standstill. Even merely requiring a ninety percent quorum would shut down UCO. Under such a rule,  the reinstitution of term limits, the very matter that you feel so strongly about, would never come to a vote.

Perhaps, Mr. Richland, the Delegates and Homeowners of Century Village are not as stupid as you think. 

2 comments:

  1. WOW!
    Finally a man of few words and right on the money.
    Mike

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'll say, and what Don4060 had to say about Mr. Richland's proposed 90% was "skewering" to say the least. Mr. R is an educator of many years, but sometimes even educators need to THINK FIRST. Or perhaps the lesson is that we all need to think first.

    ReplyDelete

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